A fabulist and a fool. Earl Gibson III/Getty Images

Spring, the season of rebirth, is as good a moment as any to review the second lives of the formerly cancelled. Some are faring better than others: Louis C.K., for one, is fully back in business, albeit after taking a multi-million dollar financial hit for his masturbatory scandal circa 2017. Roseanne Barr, who lost her TV series over a racist (and allegedly Ambien-induced) tweet is now a moderately successful podcaster, as well as a cast member on a new, “anti-woke” animated series from The Daily Wire. Shane Gillis, fired from Saturday Night Live over offensive comments, was welcomed back to the stage as host this year, a sure sign that all was forgiven.
These are the success stories, the comebacks, the triumphs over adversity. But then, in a category all his own, there’s Jussie Smollett.
Smollett was initially moderately famous as a TV actor on the Fox network show Empire, where he’d been a regular cast member for five seasons from 2014. But then, in 2019, he shot to global infamy as the perpetrator of a hoax hate crime — one that has remained vivid in our collective memory not just because of its sensationally improbable narrative, but because Smollett refuses to let us forget.
It was a brutally cold night in Chicago, in January, when two white men allegedly assaulted Smollett after recognising him on the street at 2am. In the actor’s telling, they beat him, threw a noose around his neck, poured bleach over his head, and screamed, “This is MAGA country!”, before fleeing into the night.
It later emerged that Smollett had staged the attack with the specific intent of having it captured by a nearby security camera and creating a storm with it on social media (the tragic cherry on top of this whole sordid affair: the camera was pointed in the wrong direction). But at the time, the combination of a hate-crime narrative plus a MAGA hat-wearing villain stroked every confirmation bias that progressive pundits and politicians had.
There was an outpouring of support, including from then-senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. And the narrative, at least in Left-leaning spaces, settled somewhere in the vicinity of “this just goes to show what life is like for a gay black man in Donald Trump’s America”; which, once the truth emerged that Smollett’s attackers were in fact a pair of Nigerian brothers whom he’d hired to attack him, was swiftly retooled by Smollett’s supporters into a “nevertheless, my original point still stands” argument about how the fact they were fooled was surely proof of rampant racism in its own right.
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