The Exhausting Month Of Jussie Smollett
I’m so drained. Watching the Jussie Smollett implosion/media circus/dumpster fire has been an emotionally exhausting experience. From the shocking initial reports of the graphically brutal assault against the popular, out, gay Empire actor, which immediately touched my own gay soul, to the bewildering avalanche of bombshell leaks, pressers, and charges by detectives assigned to the case and their Chief, this still-unfolding story has turned February 2019 into the longest short month of the year. When news broke on that frigid morning at the end of January, that Jussie had been set upon by two masked assailants on a dark North Chicago street, while on a food run in the post-midnight doldrums, excoriated with racial and homophobic slurs, beaten, noosed, and as a parting shot, the words, “This is MAGA country!” hurled at him, it went straight to my core. That a beloved, successful Black gay man, a celebrity of no small renown, could be attacked in such a fulminant, brazen way, it was an obvious warning that no gay or Black person was safe.
To quote James Kunetka, “writing is a good profession. You can put your heart into it.” I’ve been writing about life in the LGBTQ community for nigh on two decades now, the good and the bad of us, our triumphs and defeats, our fabulous moments just as much as our foibles. Our struggles have been the stuff of high drama, as we strive still to find our true and equal place in a society that meanders between expropriating our unique culture and extirpating us from its presence. Therefore, when the Jussie story cane across my news ticker, it naturally set off alarm bells. The lede had every element of what is base about life for LGBTQ+ people in the time if Trump: Gay-bashing. MAGA. A prominent gay person of color. A degrading assault. I was shaken. This was hatred on a whole new plane of reality.
Nevertheless, like countless other journalists gay and straight across America, I picked up the phone and started working the story. I spoke to people from Empire, Chicago cops, luminaries from my own community, and other reporters, looking for one more tidbit of information to elucidate what had, in fact, just transpired. One unnerving element of all this journalistic gumshoe work, ironically, came out of Facebook. It was the astonishing alacrity with which, as my good friend, out pastor and former BET producer Kevin Taylor noted, “people went right to the lowest common denominator”, questioning, sight unseen, Jussie’s account of his back-alley beatdown.
Rev. Taylor, who has steadfastly supported Jussie along with other notable Black gay personalities such as comedian Sampson McCormick and filmmaker Nathan Hale Williams, was perturbed by this rush to apparent judgment. He rightly pointed out that those who questioned Jussie’s presence on Chicago’s streets at 2 AM, as though he were a schoolkid out after curfew, forgot that the actor is a grown man with all the independence of action that entitles him to. Whether Jussie was out for a salad after a long plane flight, or looking for a bedmate, that was entirely his business, which he should be able to go about without getting beaten up. I felt exactly as Rev. Taylor, Sampson, and Nathan did, and carefully framed my articles about Jussie to portray the effects of the incident on his cast mates, and the gay world at large. I believed Jussie and wanted to do his story some justice.
Then the whole thing turned into a stinking mess, like a flaming drum full of feces and diesel fuel.
One of my more pragmatic friends has a phrase he uses, that has stayed with me, when I express amazement at some craziness in the world: “let me unshock you”. Now there’s a jarring, in-your-face reorientation of things. That moment in the Jussie story came for me when the police let slip that they’d picked up a pair of erstwhile extras from the show, to which their sleuthing had led them. These two brothers, Chicagoans of Nigerian descent, were at first persons of interest in the attack, then suspects in custody, then cooperating witnesses. Through that undulating sequence of events, 20th Century Fox and Empire creator Lee Daniels stood by their man, even as the story itself underwent more gyrations than the prime-time soap opera’s plot.
Jussie himself, after an angry, tearful, 20-minute interview with Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America, stopped talking and retained a criminal defense lawyer. Of course, that was an ominous sign, and it wasn’t long before Jussie was transformed from aggrieved victim to grief-inducing suspect himself. The brothers owned up, police say, to participating in a staged “publicity stunt”, which Jussie masterminded and paid for by check (!), because he was, in CPD Chief Eddie Johnson’s words, “dissatisfied with his Empire salary.” They had evidence, including video footage, text messages, Jussie’s check, the items used in the attack, and phone logs. Oh, and Jussie allegedly mailed himself a death threat which “didn’t get enough attention”. Oh, and one of the brothers was allegedly Jussie’s Ecstasy dealer. Oh, and Jussie allegedly told the cops he had an “untreated drug addiction”. Oh, and Jussie had a history of lying to the cops. Pandora’s box was fully open for all the world to see.
Now Jussie is left with the fallout of his own apparent machinations. Lee Daniels and the studio, once so stalwart in his defense, have separated him from the show, after Jussie returned to the set from court to face the unbridled wrath of his colleagues. He faces felony jail time if he’s convicted of filing a false police report, and no longer earns the $65,000-per-episide salary that was the source of his frustration, plus there’s a federal investigation into the provenance of the threatening letter. If it’s borne out that Jussie is the source of that little missive, his problems will become exponentially worse. If this is all a product if Jussie’s mendacity, the naysayers who doubted him from the start will be proven correct, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole messy affair will have a chilling effect on those actual victims of hate crimes, who will be reticent to report them in the aftermath of this imbroglio. I know that God forbid, something like this were ever to happen to me, I’d shut the hell up, go to the ER and get my stitches, and speak of it no more henceforth. That’s where we are, and that’s where Jussie has put us.
My feelings are raw. I’m exhausted.
