Pictures: American Actor Jussie Smollett Sentenced to 5 Months Imprisonment
The Jussie Smollett staged hate crime story came to a dramatic end Thursday when a Chicago judge ordered him to spend five months behind bars for concocting a “disgraceful” scheme to fake a hate crime, prompting the actor to scream out in protest: “I’m innocent!”
“I could’ve said I was guilty a long time ago!” Smollett bellowed as he was led away in handcuffs and remanded into custody.
“I did not do this and I am not suicidal and if anything happens to me when I go there, I did not do it to myself and you must all know that.”
Before handing down his sentence, Judge James Linn asked Smollett if he’d like to say anything but he declined, with his attorney Nenye Uche explaining he advised against it because of their plans to appeal the conviction.
Linn sentenced Smollett to 30 months of probation, the first five of which he must spend in the Cook County jail, and ordered him to pay the city of Chicago $120,000 in restitution and a $25,000 fine after he was found guilty on five counts of felony disorderly conduct following his eight-day trial late last year.
As he delivered his sentence, Linn called the actor a “disgrace” and said his performance during the trial, in which he testified on his own behalf, was “pure perjury.”
“You’re not the victim of a racist hate crime, you’re not the victim of a homopobic hate crime, you’re just a charlatan pretending to be the victim of a hate crime and that’s shameful especially,” Linn told the court.
The sentence comes nearly three years after Smollett asked two men to “fake beat him up”, tie a noose around his neck, douse him in bleach andcshout racist and homophobic slurs at him on a Streeterville street corner near his apartment in the middle of a polar vortex.
