Jussie Smollett and the No Good, Very Bad Tale

The news that Empire star Jussie Smollett may have orchestrated his own hate crime certainly came as a shock to much of America. Joe Jervis, however, wasn’t exactly surprised.

Jervis, creator of the news blog Joe.My.God, has been covering LGBTQ-related news and events for 15 years. Several years ago, he decided he would only report on alleged hate crimes if at least one of three criteria were met: There had been an arrest, there was conclusive video evidence, or there were uninvolved eye-witness accounts. The recent assault of a gay man in Salt Lake City, which was captured on film, fits the bill. Jussie Smollett’s alleged assault—with no eye-witnesses, arrests, or video evidence—did not, but because Smollett is famous and the national media was already reporting the story, Jervis made an exception to his own rule. Still, not all his readers—whom, he says, are “overwhelmingly older gay men”—were buying it.

“I didn’t want to weigh in on if it was real or not, but from the comments and the emails I received, a lot of my readers were immediately skeptical,” Jervis told me in a phone interview. And while plenty of the comments on his posts about Smollett are sympathetic—gay men of a certain age tend to have experiences with hate—quite a few commenters anonymously expressed their doubts. ”As a Chicagoan—this is odd,” one comment reads. “Certainly, weirder things have happened, but this in downtown Chicago? Color me a Suspicious Susie—but hope Jussie is okay no matter what went down.”

At the same time, those on the left who had misgivings mostly kept quiet. It’s a lot more socially acceptable to express your support of the victim of an alleged hate crime than it is to question whether it happened. Doubting the apparent victim of a hate crime was just too toxic a position to take.

Privately, though, people expressed skepticism, especially as strange details emerged. According to news reports and police statements, Smollett initially didn’t want to report the attack but he still left the noose around his neck until the officers arrived to take his statement 40 minutes after his manager called the police in order to preserve evidence. If Smollett didn’t want to report the assault, why in the world would he keep that rope around his neck? It just didn’t make sense.

Unfortunately, hate crime hoaxes in the LGBTQ community are hardly new. In the early years of Joe Jervis’s blog, he dutifully reported on alleged anti-gay hate crimes when they occurred. And then, after a number of them—for instance, the case of a Tennessee couple that burned down their own house and claimed they were targeted for being lesbians—ended up being either untrue or wildly exaggerated, he decided not to report on allegations unless they were backed up by some evidence.

Jervis had good reason for caution: Violence, like many social phenomena, can be contagious. This is true of suicide and mass shootings, which have been shown to spike after high-profile incidents. The more the media publicizes hate crimes, the more likely they may be to happen. And this includes hate crime hoaxes as well.

“Some messed up people see the attention others get from being the victim of a hate crime and they want some of that for themselves,” Jervis told me. “It’s a way of helping their hurt.”

Of course, the repercussions of falsely reporting a hate crime are enormous, and not just for the perpetrator, who can be (and, in Smollett’s case, may very well be) charged with false reporting. Hate crime hoaxes have the same effect as actual hate crimes: They create panic and terror. Often, as in Smollett’s case, it’s the perpetrator's own community that suffers. Queer black people in Chicago were led to believe that there are racist white men roaming the streets with nooses and bleach looking for victims, and, as multiple think pieces argued in the days after the attack, if Jussie Smollett isn’t safe, who is?

If Smollett did make this story up, his lie will be used to dismiss the actual victims of hate crimes going forth.

At this point, it looks as though Smollett paid two Nigerian American friends to help him stage the attack. (While I'm all about diversity in casting, in this case, it seems like the director would have been wise to cast villians who were a little more white). If this ends up being what happened, Smollett has given a tragic gift to the conservative right and the Trump administration. He tearfully claimed on Good Morning America that if his attackers had been black, Mexican, or Muslim—and if he weren’t an outspoken Trump critic—everyone would have believed him, no doubt. When Trump screams “fake news,” this is the kind of thing he is talking about, and while most national and Chicago reporters did a very good job of simply reporting the facts as they changed, the vast majority of opinion pieces were squarely on Smollett’s side. When Chicago reporters covering the story did cast doubt on Smollett's story, some were accused of spreading misinformation or of being homophobic and racist themselves. Trump and his cronies at Fox News will use this as further evidence that the mainstream media is irreparably biased, and plenty of people will believe them.

breitbart.com
By Alana Mastrangelo
on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo
and on Instagram.

Here’s 12 establishment media commentators and journalists who fueled the Jussie Smollett flames with impassioned and uncritical reactions to the Empire actor’s imaginative account of his supposed run-in with Trump supporters in “MAGA country” Chicago.

1. Eugene Scott – Washington Post‘s The Fix reporter——“To many, the Smollett incident — and the political nature of the assault — is yet another reminder for many black gay Americans that this president’s vision of a ‘great America’ does not appear to include them,” wrote Eugene Scott for Washington Post‘s The Fix.

2. Don Lemon – CNN journalist-——CNN’s Don Lemon told Red Table Talk that he wasn’t shocked when he heard Smollett’s story, adding that he was concerned about the actor’s “well-being” in having to deal with being black, gay, and famous.

“One, he has to deal with discrimination as a black man,” said Lemon, “then, on top of that, he has to be gay — and then, fame — fame is not natural — When something happens to you and it’s controversial, everyone is coming for you, and so I knew everyone would be picking apart his story.”

3. Yamiche Alcindor – PBS NewsHour White House correspondent—— “We have to do better as a country. This is disgusting,” said PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, in a tweet referring to the alleged attackers shouting “This is MAGA country,” which was then retweeted by CNN commentator Sally Kohn.

4. Joyce Vance – MSNBC contributor——“If someone commits this kind of act under your banner, you should have the decency to publicly condemn them and say it’s not what you stand for. But I doubt Trump will,” tweeted MSNBC contributor Joyce Vance in response to Alcindor.

5. Jamil Smith – Rolling Stone journalist-—“The brutal attack on him in Chicago appears to be yet another example not just of further moral decay, but of the brand of terrorism that still doesn’t seem to spark enough response by Americans,” tweeted Rolling Stone journalist Jamil Smith.

6. April Ryan – CNN analyst-——“This attack on @JussieSmollett is a hate crime and should be treated as such!” affirmed CNN’s April Ryan, in response to the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson, who claimed the actor had been a victim of a “racist, homophobic attack” and that “divisive, hateful rhetoric” is putting “lives at risk.”

7. Jemele Hill – The Atlantic journalist——“I’ve met @JussieSmollett a few times at social events and he emanates warmth and joy. I’m just disgusted and appalled that he has suffered the unimaginable,” tweeted an uncritical Jemele Hill.

8. Zerlina Maxwell – MSNBC analyst——“The media is broken. If they can’t call the attack on Jussie racist straight up then they need to find alternative employment,” argued the MSNBC analyst, scrutinizing any media that had been referring to the incident as an “apparent hate crime.”

“Apparent HATE CRIME?” continued Maxwell, “Sure bc that has a legal definition. But to be clear pouring bleach on a Black person while you are yelling about MAGA = RACIST”

9. Joy Reid – MSNBC correspondent——“Nooses never really disappeared as messages of a very specific kind of terror,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, “but every time they’re used, my God, it’s chilling. Praying for Jussie’s full recovery. And for us all.”

10. Karen Attiah – Washington Post editor-——“Regarding the heinous attack on @JussieSmollett, yet another reminder that Trump’s ascendance and the resulting climate of hate has meant that lives have been increasingly at stake since 2015. Smollett could have been killed by those thugs screaming MAGA. Let that sink in,” tweeted Washington Post editor Karen Attiah.

11. Amy Siskind – Huffington Post contributor——“Can we get anyone in the Trump orbit to condemn the 2 MAGA men who brutally attacked Jussie Smollett, a gay black man, and put his head in a noose while saying ‘This is MAGA country,’ so others don’t feel like your silence is legitimizing hate? How about you @realDonaldTrump?” tweeted Huffington Post contributor Amy Siskind.

“Confirmed. Trump needs to address this attack publicly and condemn it!” continued Siskind in another tweet, which included a Huffington Post article that did not confirm anything, other than the fact that Smollett had spoken to the police.

12. Brooke Baldwin – CNN journalist and news anchor——“Absolutely despicable,” said CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on CNN Newsroom, “and this is America in 2019.”

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