The title of the Netflix documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, out on Netflix Aug. 22, ends on a question mark for a reason: Director Gagan Rehill wants to leave it up to viewers to decide whether the Black and gay Empire actor Jussie Smollett was the victim of a hate crime or the perpetrator of his own hate crime.
Smollett maintains that on Jan. 29, 2019, he was out in the middle of the night near his apartment in downtown Chicago, and en route home from Subway sandwich shop, when a white man started shouting “Empire faggot n*****” and “this is MAGA country!” He claims two men in balaklavas poured bleach on him and put a noose around his neck—a noose that he was still wearing when police arrived at his apartment.
The story went viral, sparking sympathy from political leaders like President Donald Trump, who called the news “horrible,” and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who declared, “This was an attempted modern day lynching.”
Legally, the case is closed. In 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his 2021 conviction, in which a jury found Smollett guilty of reporting a fake hate crime. He was sentenced to five months in prison, but he only served six days because he was let out on appeal.
Yet, there are people who don’t think Smollett is telling the truth. There’s no video of the attack, and there’s no DNA evidence from the crime scene, so the case is still shrouded in mystery. The Truth About Jussie Smollett? features an interview with Smollett as well. It also features representatives of the Chicago Police Department on the case against Smollett, lawyers on both sides, the two brothers who accuse Smollett of making everything up, and freelance journalists who have looked into the case and support Smollett’s story.
“I’m not sure we’re going to get any further concrete answers,” Rehill says. “Ultimately, my film isn’t really about that…I want people to come away from this and think, oh, okay, well, we live in a society now where these two truths can exist next to each other.”
Here’s how the documentary presents the two schools of thought on Smollett’s case.
The people who think Jussie Smollett is lying
The red flag for former Chicago superintendent of police Eddie Johnson was the way Smollett was handling the noose very carefully in his apartment, per police body camera footage, which viewers will see in the documentary. Johnson was suspicious because he didn’t know why Smollett would have kept the noose on.
“My family is from the deep South in Alabama so I saw some things growing up,” he says. “I don’t know many Black people, if there was a noose around their neck, they’re not going to leave it on there. They’re going to treat it with disdain and disgust.” Johnson also said Smollett was hesitant to hand over his phone.
This case against Smollett primarily centers on Abimbola “Bola” Osundairo and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, two brothers who knew Smollett and say he told them to attack him.
After reviewing ride-share and taxi data, the Chicago police say the Osundairo brothers were the literally the only two people in the area of the alleged crime.
Bola says that before the incident, Smollett texted him out of the blue one day and asked if he could talk “on the low.”
When he took an Uber to the Empire set, he claims Smollett told him that he wanted Bola and Ola to beat him up and then post the footage on social media. “I believe he wanted to be the poster boy of activism for Black people, for gay people, or for marginalized people,” Bola says in the doc.
But there is also no hard proof connecting Ola and Bola to the crime.
The case that Jussie Smollett was telling the truth
In the walk-up to the attack, Smollett says he received a note in which the letters were cut out from magazines, with a stick figure of a man with a noose around his neck. Smollett’s mother was a member of the Black Panthers, and Smollett was known for being outspoken about the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality issues.
As to why he left the noose around his neck when the police arrived, he says, “I was not sitting there for 35 minutes with it around my neck. I put it back on because I wanted to show them what was happening.”
In terms of the text messages to the Osundairo brothers, Smollett says he was actually asking for drugs, using code to ask for an herbal steroid to lose belly fat that is illegal in the U.S. but can be obtained in Nigeria. And he says the $3,500 check was for personal training sessions led by Bola.
There are also two people who back up what Smollett saw. A security guard at a Sheraton says he saw a white man running down the street around the time Smollett says he was attacked. And a neighbor in Smollett’s apartment building said she saw a man with rope hanging out of his coat while she was walking her dog in front of the building. “I thought to myself, this is it, this is going to exonerate me,” Smollett says.
Two freelance journalists who reviewed the videos that police were working with for coverage of Smollett’s case argue in the documentary that the figure who is running down the street looks white, not Black like the Osundairo brothers. As Tina Glandian, attorney at Geragos and Geragos, who represented Smollett, notes, “Why would Jussie hire two Nigerian guys to do an attack that he was going to say was perpetrated by white guys, if it was going to be caught on tape?”
Jussie Smollett today
Smollett is still figuring out the next steps in his career, but participating in the documentary appears to be his way of setting the record straight on a news cycle that he describes as a game of “whac-a-mole,” given all of the rumors and theories.
The documentary ends with Smollett saying, “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether someone likes me or doesn’t like me. It doesn’t matter whether you like the way I’m giving this interview. It doesn’t matter whether you like the way I look right now or not. Doesn’t matter whether you love my performances or can’t stand them. That’s unimportant. What is important is, regardless of what you think about me, flaws and all, flaws and greatness, whatever you think—joy and sorrow. I didn’t do that [fake a hate crime] and that’s all that matters.”
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