Can anyone give a tl;dr version of this whole event?
For those of you just joining us...
At like the end of January Empire actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he was attacked by two racists
He went out at 2 AM to buy a Subway sandwich, and on the way back to his apartment in Chicago, two white men jumped him and said "this is MAGA country!" and attacked him mildly and put a noose around his neck and splashed some bleach on him, and ran off giggling
They were waiting for him for hours in -20 degree weather with a rope and a bottle of bleach on a streetcorner where the camera was facing the wrong way to be able to see them
When police arrived he still had the noose around his neck
Police asked Jussie to see his phone but he didn't give it to them
So they secretly subpoena'd his records from his carrier anyway, so later when he did give them redacted records it was kind of easy to see which ones he didn't want them to know about
Using various security cameras they were able to track his movements all through his trip but never saw any racists, though they did catch two men walking on one camera
The two men were extras on Empire from Nigeria who knew Jussie, they had immediately left for Nigeria after that night and police were waiting to pick them up when they returned
After many doubts were expressed for these two weeks Jussie hired the same PR firm that Harvey Weinstein did after he got #metoo'd, and the PR firm hooked him up with a softball Good Morning America interview where he tearfully described the attack
And here we are with tweets flying all over about whether his character was getting cut and he wanted sympathy, or he had a gay furry lover who attacked him and he needed to re-frame his bodily harm, or maybe it all happened exactly as he described
But the main thing to remember is
It doesn't matter what you thought of this incident, whether you believed him or not. If you intensely followed the details at all and wasted your life on this shit, you lose.
