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The Empire actor was accused of a hate crime hoax and filing a false police report. But the charges were suddenly dropped.

In February, Empire actor Jussie Smollett was arrested for allegedly filing a false police report in what authorities said was a hate crime hoax. But in an unexpected development on Tuesday, state prosecutors dropped all charges against Smollett during an emergency court hearing, his attorneys said.

“Jussie was attacked by two people he was unable to identify on January 29th. He was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgement,” Smollett’s attorneys said in a statement.

“Jussie and many others were hurt by these unfair and unwarranted actions,” the statement continued. “This entire situation is a reminder that there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion. That is wrong.”

It remains unclear why the charges were dropped, with government officials so far giving only vague explanations for the outcome.

After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said.

Smollett, who’s black and gay, had claimed that he was attacked on January 29 by two masked men at the entrance of the Loews hotel in Chicago. The two men, Smollett said, yelled racist and homophobic remarks. They also reportedly told him, in a reference to President Donald Trump’s slogan, “This is MAGA country.”

But shortly after, Smollett was arrested and charged with 16 felony counts for allegedly filing a false police report. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson claimed Smollett staged the attack to his benefit because he was unhappy with his salary.

The two men arrested for the attack, Olabinjo Osundairo and Abimbola Osundairo, had ties to Smollett. Police claimed Smollett paid the brothers $3,500 to fake the incident.

Smollett insisted he didn’t stage the attack. He reportedly told the cast of Empire, after he was released on bail, “I would never do this to any of you, you are my family. I swear to God, I did not do this.”

After the arrest, Smollett was cut from Empire.

At some level, this is a bizarre case — one that seems to be getting attention only because Smollett is a celebrity. But the story, with its links to Trump and hate crimes, has activated much broader issues about racism, homophobia, politically motivated attacks, and distrust in the media. With every twist and turn, the case offers another chance to relitigate all these issues.

Police initially detained two suspects — only to release them when the investigation’s trajectory “shifted”

The details of the alleged January 29 attack were terrifying. Smollett suggested it was a politically motivated hate crime, with his attackers allegedly tying a noose around his neck and pouring a substance on him that he believed was bleach before they fled. The attack drew national attention, with Trump’s critics citing it as another example of the hate that Trump’s own racist rhetoric has inspired.

Police were unable to find surveillance video of the attack even though it was in a heavily trafficked area with plenty of cameras nearby. They did, however, release images from surveillance video a day after the incident that showed two shadowed people walking down a sidewalk. Authorities wanted to take them in for questioning.

On February 13, police arrested two men, the Osundairo brothers. Police later confirmed that one of the brothers worked for Empire, which is likely how Smollett knew them prior to the attack.

Police raided the brothers’ home in search of the liquid suspected of being poured on Smollett. They recovered Empire scripts, a phone, and a black mask.

Until February 15, the brothers were being treated by investigators as “persons of interest.” But by that afternoon, the narrative had turned. Police released them both without charges, saying new evidence had “shifted the trajectory of the investigation.”

News reports, citing anonymous sources, suggested the attack was a hoax

Rumors began circulating that Smollett was somehow involved in his own attack, and that he may even have orchestrated it all. By February 16, Anthony Guglielmi, the Chicago police spokesperson, said they were looking to interview Smollett again, although authorities still hadn’t indicated why.

Initially, local media outlets were primarily the ones driving the story. According to CBS Chicago, two unnamed sources with “intimate knowledge of the investigation” said Smollett was potentially behind the attack and had involved the two brothers. ABC7 ran another story, again with unnamed sources, who claimed that police were investigating whether the attack was staged “allegedly because Smollett was being written off of ‘Empire’” — although police later said the attack was allegedly staged over his salary, not because he was being written off the show.

National outlets then picked up the story. An unnamed source told CBS News that the Osundairos told investigators that Smollett had paid them off. CNN similarly reported that “[t]wo law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation” said Smollett “paid two men to orchestrate an assault on him that he reported late last month.”

CBS News, citing anonymous sources, reported that Smollett was upset that he didn’t get a “bigger reaction” from a threatening letter sent to him previously, so he staged the attack. Two federal officials told ABC News that the FBI and US Postal Service were investigating if Smollett played a role in sending the threatening letter, and Chicago police claimed that the letter was also fake.

The Chicago Police Department, however, acknowledged that some of the information leaked to media during the investigation has been “inaccurate,” and the department has launched an internal investigation into the leaks.

In his first televised interview after first reporting his account of the attack, Smollett on February 14 told ABC host Robin Roberts that he was “pissed off” that critics doubted his story.

On February 16, Smollett’s attorneys released a statement saying Smollett is “angered and devastated” to find that he knows the alleged perpetrators in the case.

“He has now been further victimized by claims attributed to these alleged perpetrators that Jussie played a role in his own attack. Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying,” the statement continued.

Police, however, continued pursuing the investigation, and arrested Smollett for filing a false police report on February 21. Then, on Tuesday, March 26, the charges were suddenly dropped.

The hoax rumors feed into a conservative conspiracy around media bias

Underpinning all the twists in Smollett’s story is his suggestion from day one that his alleged assailants supported Trump. The actor said in his statement to police that his masked attacker told him, “This is MAGA country,” along with racist and homophobic remarks. He later had to push back on reports that they were wearing MAGA hats while pinning him down.

“They called me a f****t, they called me a n****r. There’s no which way you cut it. I don’t need some MAGA hat as the cherry on some racist sundae,” Smollett said in his interview with Roberts on February 14.

So once rumors began to surface suggesting that Smollett manufactured his attack, conservative media and pundits quickly pointed to his story as evidence of a broad conspiracy aimed at vilifying Trump supporters.

As conservative CNN commentator S.E. Cupp noted, Trump backers were “giddy” in their reaction to reports speculating about a hoax. And it’s clear from the responses to Cupp’s tweet that Smollett’s critics saw the new developments as validation that Trump supporters — not minorities, LGBTQ individuals, or other disadvantaged groups — are the people who are actually being persecuted.

It’s very similar to the “validation” seen last month after the Covington Catholic High School teens were dragged online for seeming to harass Native American elders. Once it became clear there was more to the story, conservative media quickly coalesced behind the students, saying they were the real victims in this case: victims of liberals’ instinctive dismissal of anyone wearing a MAGA cap.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote at the time, the Covington drama became something of a Rorschach test, with “each side seeing what it wants to in a way that’s more revealing about their own worldviews than the actual incident.” For the right, it revealed several of their “core animating assumptions”:

From their point of view, the liberal reaction to the video, and not the footage itself, was the biggest problem. It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.

That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.

Then, as now, the ensuing backlash to the initial news reports also ignited anti-media sentiment among conservatives. Even though most coverage of the actor’s attack directly reflected police statements, and it was clear the investigation was ongoing, the developing narrative was taken as proof that journalists blindly accept stories with a careless disregard for the facts — particularly those stories that support liberal ideals.

In both the Covington and Smollett cases, liberals were quick to condemn what was, at first glance, unacceptable behavior. Even Trump, who’s often criticized for taking his time before commenting on cases where the victims are minorities or from disadvantaged groups, denounced Smollet’s alleged attack as “horrible.”

“It doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned,” he said from the Oval Office, days after news of the supposed attack broke.

No matter how the facts shake out, the case now hits at the core identity that Trump shares with his supporters, perpetuating a dangerous worldview that the media is corrupt and the stories of racism and bigotry are better off not being believed.

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