<\/p>\n
Jussie Smollett has been jailed for 150 and ordered to pay more than $100 000 in fines and restitution days after staging a hoax hate crime in Chicago.<\/p>\n
The former \u201cEmpire\u201d star was found guilty of five felony counts of disorderly conduct in December put against him after lying to police after claiming to be the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in March 2019.<\/p>\n
As the sentence was handed down in a Cook County courtroom in Chicago on Thursday, the 39-year-old actor told the court:\u201cYour honour, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I did not do this,\u201d before telling the court, \u201cand I am not suicidal. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself. And you must all know that.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the custodial sentence, Jussie was given 30 months of felony probation and ordered to pay $120\u00a0106 (about R1.8\u00a0million) in restitution and a $25\u00a0000 fine. <\/p>\n
The presiding judge labelled the actor a \u201ccharlatan\u201d and commented that he had done harm to real victims of hate crimes, many too frightened to come forward and tell the authorities. <\/p>\n
The judge James Linn also expressed fears that people might be reluctant to believe other stories of similar \u2013 but real \u2013 injustices, saying he had committed \u201chour upon hour of perjury\u201d while \u201clying\u201d while testifying on the stand. <\/p>\n
Throughout the trial, \u2018The Mighty Ducks\u2019 star maintained his innocence and fought against the allegations that he had hired brothers Abel and Bola Osundairo to help stage the attack. <\/p>\n
In February, Jussie filed the papers to initiate a new trial, citing that his lawyers had not been able to assist in the picking of the jury. In addition, he asked the judge to reserve the verdict and is involved in a civil case related to the incident.<\/p>\n
Source <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jussie Smollett has been jailed for 150 and ordered to pay more than $100 000 in fines and restitution days after staging a hoax hate crime in Chicago. The former \u201cEmpire\u201d star was found guilty of five felony counts of disorderly conduct in December put against him after lying to police after claiming to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1017892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1017891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1017891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1017891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1017891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1017891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}