The city of Chicago is making preparations to sue actor Jussie Smollett for the sum of $130,000 in an effort to recoup the costs of the hate crime investigation, this comes after the “Empire” actor refuses to repay for the investigation costs.
Recently, all the charges against Smollett were dropped by the Cook County State Attorney’s office, they totaled 16 counts. Smollett was at the time charged for a hate crime against himself. This decision resulted in an uproar in the city of Chicago, with even the Mayor and other high ranking officials blasting the prosecutor’s office.
After the charges were dropped, the city’s Department of Law sent a bill in the amount of $130,106.15 to Jussie Smollett, also giving him one week to have the bill paid. According to reports that deadline ended on Thursday around midday, the Law Department then released a statement saying that they will be drafting a lawsuit against Smollett.
The city has declared that “Mr. Smollett has refused to reimburse the City of Chicago for the cost of police overtime spent investigating his false police report on Jan. 29, 2019, so the Law Department is now drafting a civil complaint that will be filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County… The Law Department will file the suit in the near future. As part of this legal action, the Law Department will pursue the full measure of damages allowed under the ordinance.”
On January 29, 2019, police were told by Smollett that he was jumped while he walking on the street at 2 a.m. It was alleged that two men beat him up and then proceeded to pour bleach on him and to add insult to injury, then used racial and homophobic slurs towards him. After some investigative work by the Chicago police department, they uncovered that Smollett hired his personal trainer, Abel Osundairo, along with his brother Ola to commit the offence and attack him. This was an elaborate scheme to gain an increased salary on the Empire show.
The case was presented to the grand jury by the prosecutor’s office, which claimed to indict Smollett on 16 charges of filing false police reports. The State’s Attorney office supported the case against Smollett and the investigation but stated that the charges were not serious enough to warrant jail time.
M. Spencer Green/AP
There was a call for State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to resign, by Kevin Graham, the president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. Foxx had indicated that she was “elected on a promise to rethink the justice system, to keep people out of prison who do not pose a danger to the community,” and she also stated that she “promised to spend my office’s finite resources on the most serious crimes in order to create communities that are both safer and fairer.”
