Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Alison Lanier | Film | September 3, 2025
I wasn’t necessarily following the Jussie Smollett case, but like the rest of the online world, I heard a ton about it anyway. The bare facts are—In 2019, Empire actor and rising star Jussie Smollett made headlines for being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in the early hours of a freezing morning in Chicago. Over the course of a few days, the official story shifted from widespread support to widespread condemnation as the police investigation made accusations against Smollett himself that he staged the attack for publicity. According to the hoax narrative, brothers Abimbola “Bola” Osundairo and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, extras on Empire, were paid by Smollett to stage the attack. A tangled series of legal victories and defeats on both sides failed to make a conclusive statement about if the law holds Smollett responsible or not, though he was found guilty at trial.
A new Netflix documentary, helpfully titled The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, unhelpfully wades into the fray years after the fact. The documentary does a lot of image rehabilitation, even if director Gagan Rehill is insistent that isn’t the documentary’s motive at all. That rehabilitation is maybe a natural knock-on effect of the unexpectedly flimsy police narrative in this case, which from the perspective of online “discourse” gave the impression of being far more ironclad.
The supposed perpetrators/co-conspirators are shown discussing “sealed” versus “expunged” records with their lawyer in suppressed footage. They laugh at the police’s statement of “we didn’t make you any promises” portion of giving their confession, as if it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard all year. The police narrative connecting the brothers to the scene—which of course the police representatives put forward as airtight—hinges on rideshare and taxi data that brought the suspected perpetrators to the neighborhood where the brothers lived … as well as on video of the brothers buying rope and ski masks. On its own, that sounds pretty bad, but it’s also not the slam dunk that the Chicago police seem to treat it as.
On the flip side, Smollett’s account is unchanging. All of the witnesses interviewed align with Smollet’s versions of events—except, of course, the brothers, who take a portion of their talking head time to promote their new book, whose title they had a difficult time getting straight. They also avoided legal repercussions for a huge cache of illegal firearms found at their home by Chicago PD. Video evidence appears to have been edited or excluded to suit the police’s version. In short—something stinks. But Smollett’s version doesn’t pass the smell test either.
The documentary is itself a narrative that covers a murky story from two competing and unflinching perspectives. I’m caught between Smollett’s less-than-convincing excuses for not turning over his phone and the thinking that he would have had time to come up with better lies by now.
No answers are presented as fact in the documentary. Smollett definitely comes into his interviews on the back foot and gives the sense that no matter what he says, he doesn’t expect that the audience will find it believable. And he’s right. Nevertheless, as the credits rolled, it was hard not to see the documentary essentially as a challenge to the police narrative, which to be fair is a pretty easy target.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about the documentary’s strategy of bringing in Laquan McDonald’s murder as a parallel incident, but it does provide a sense of the intensity of the context for Smollett’s controversy. A department that lied about its own cold-blooded murder of a Black child doesn’t inspire a sense of confidence in how they might handle an unsolvable and high profile case of assault against a Black man.
In the structure of the documentary, that pro-Smollett analysis falls in at about three quarters of the way in, alongside an independent journalist uncovering the conveniently edited video footage and witnesses recounting their testimony in support of Smollett’s version. To a true crime viewer, that placement occupies the standard reveal/deep-dive portion of a given true crime story that pulls back the curtain on the whole mystery. Without saying it outright, the documentary hands the hoax-doubters the more “truthful” role in the movie’s structure.
In the end, The Truth about Jussie Smollett? is an exercise in raising questions, productive and unproductive, around a larger-than-life story that permeated public attention with a force to rival an ill-fated Coldplay concert kisscam. It’s worth a watch to weigh the complicated scandal for yourself.
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? is now streaming on Netflix.
