Early in the morning hours of a polar vortex in January 2019, FOX's "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett claimed two White supremacist Trump supporters attacked him near his Chicago apartment in a racially-motivated hate crime that would soon incite outrage from activists and the media.
It's the "hate crime" that dominated headlines, but facts proved none of it was true.
In December 2021, the now-40-year-old actor and singer was convicted of five felony counts of disorderly conduct. One year ago, he was sentenced in March 2022 to 150 days in county jail.
Brothers Abimbola "Bola" and Olabinjo "Ola" Osundairo, Smollett's accomplices in the act, finally broke their silence to the media about the hoax for the first time in an interview now streaming on Fox Nation.
"A friend of mine had sent me a screenshot of the front page of, I believe a TMZ article, that showed that Jussie had been attacked. I ran to my brother and was like, ‘Yo, mission accomplished. We did it,’" Bola recounted in the five-part series. "Now we've secured the payment of our $500 that he owes us because he only wrote us a check of [sic] $3,500, and that was the day we were supposed to leave for Nigeria."
Bola said he and Ola were heading out of the country for an audition for a popular TV series at the time.
"Things were on the up and up for us. Things were looking pretty good," Ola said.
Smollett alleged the "White supremacists" - or the brothers in disguise, rather - threw chemicals on him and put a noose around his neck, while shouting racially and homophobically-charged slurs and telling him he was in "MAGA country."
But the identities of the men behind the masks slowly began to unravel.
"You know Eddie Johnson [former Chicago Police Superintendent] said he could tell in the footage that you guys are Black, right?" an off-camera interviewer asked the brothers.
"Really?" Ola asked. "I feel like he's just saying that… we were in character the whole time."
"So you think you guys are believable White supremacists?" the interviewer pressed.
BIDEN, HARRIS LED FRENZY TO AMPLIFY JUSSIE SMOLLETT'S FALSE HATE CRIME CLAIMS
"One hundred percent! Look at me," Bola laughed. Chicago Police released images of the incident shortly after it took place, but Johnson said the initially released image of two silhouettes walking shoulder-to-shoulder down the snowy Chicago street was not the best image they had at the time.
The other showed one brother wearing a red hat – presumably a MAGA hat.
"I didn't want people to focus on that," Bola said upon reflecting, later explaining that Black and LGBTQ+ communities would have been outraged. "Sometimes, once the toothpaste gets out of the tube, you can get it back in there."
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Still, others believed the fabricated incident alluded to larger problems with racism in Trump's America.
"Everyone immediately thought ‘This is what Trump’s America is like," New York Post national correspondent Gabrielle Fonrouge said in the special. "You had people in MAGA hats chasing after a Black man in the night, tying a rope around his neck calling him racist slurs, calling him homophobic slurs," she continued.
The new Fox Nation special "Anatomy of a Hoax" hones in on other voices like Bola's and Ola's who never spoke to the media about the case — until now.
To take a deep dive into the Jussie Smollett-staged hate crime, sign up for Fox Nation and stream the special today.
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