It’s a question both the public and prosecutors have struggled with over the years. In 2019, Smollett claimed to have been the victim of a racist, homophobic attack in Chicago. After an ensuing investigation by the Chicago PD, however, he was accused of staging the attack because he was unsatisfied with his Empire salary. Smollett was arrested and charged with filing a false police report, but the charges were dropped shortly thereafter. In 2020, he was re-indicted and eventually convicted on five felony counts in 2021. He was sentenced to prison in 2022, though he only served six days. There was another update to the case last year, as Smollett’s conviction was overturned on the basis of double jeopardy. This May, the actor also made a substantial charitable donation to settle a civil suit over the alleged hoax with the city of Chicago, effectively ending the long, weird saga.
Smollett has maintained his innocence throughout and will presumably get another chance to advocate for himself in the documentary. Deadline reports that it will feature an interview with the actor. The project comes from director Gagan Rehill, who previously helmed Netflix’s Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, and production company Raw, which counts Netflix true crime docs The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F**k With Cats among its credits. The documentary is a “shocking true story of an allegedly fake story that some now say might just be a true story,” its logline reads. “With first-hand interviews from those at the helm, including investigating police, lawyers, journalists and Jussie himself, this compelling documentary invites the audience to decide for themselves who is telling The Truth About Jussie Smollett?.”
“I’m very excited to be sharing this film with Netflix viewers,” Rehill said in a statement (per Deadline). “This story is a thrilling ride, and we were lucky enough to have access to the key players. I wanted this documentary to balance their competing narratives and to also use their compelling, colorful testimonies to thread the light and shade of the story through the film. But much more than that, I wanted this film to speak to the particular moment of rapid cultural change when this takes place in 2019; when, as a society, we were becoming more combative, more polarized, more divergent over our shared reality—when we began to lack a common singular Truth.”
