In our previous installment we saw the ludicrous public crying display of Smollett’s black defense lawyer. We also saw the prosecution rest its case, which brought us up to December 5. You can read that article here. And the previous two here and here.
Contrary to the title of the first article I wrote, we are only now getting to the defense portion of the trial, where Smollett explains that he didn’t lie to the police. At all. Like, not even the “yep, those Nigerian KKK members assaulted me,” part.
Jussie Smollett’s legal team began its defense of the former “Empire” actor late Thursday on charges alleging he orchestrated and reported a phony hate crime attack on himself to boost his career.
After Judge James Linn denied a routine defense motion for a directed finding of not guilty, the defense called as its first witness Brandon Moore, the actor’s music manager, who was on the phone with Smollett when the attack occurred.
Moore said he overheard someone on Jussie’s end of the conversation yell anti-gay epithets and “MAGA country.”
“I proceeded to hear the phone drop and stuff. … It started to sound kind of intense,” he said. “Jussie got on the phone and said ‘I just got jumped.’ … He sounded panicked. Sounded out of breath.”
So, a guy who was on the phone. Okay, not really sure what he could possibly have to contribute to the defense at all. Everyone already knows there was a (staged) attack on Smollett.
The defense also called Dr. Robert Turelli, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Smollett went to get checked out after the beating. Turelli testified the injuries — including redness to the neck and scratches on his cheeks — were real, and that Smollett underwent X-rays and a CT scan.
On cross-examination, Turelli testified that Smollett got Tylenol for pain but declined anything stronger. He also said none of the tests at the hospital showed Smollett had any additional injuries.
A little redness on the neck, and scratches on his cheeks. Dear god, how did Smollett survive this attack?
Olabinjo, a former stand-in on “Empire,” testified that on the night of the attack he was initially distracted by a nearby car, but sprang into action when he saw his younger brother, Abimbola, wrestling with Smollett on the ground.
He said he had pulled one of the strings out of the package of rope they’d purchased at a hardware store and “made it look like a noose.”
“That’s when I ran with the rope, put it around his face, and (brought) out the bleach and put it on his sweater,” he testified.
Jurors have previously viewed stills from surveillance video after the attack, which shows Smollett walking up the stairs to his apartment building with the rope looped around his neck.
The insinuation by prosecutors was obvious: Smollett pulled the rope around his neck himself after the brothers ran off.
My one regret in life is not writing 40 articles on this until now. The retarded Nigerians didn’t know how to make a real noose, so they just pulled at one of the threads of rope until it sort of came out, and then tried to put that around Smollett’s neck, and it didn’t work. So Smollett had to get the rope, make his own noose, and then get his own noose around his own neck so he could pose for the Police Bodycams.
During cross-examination Thursday afternoon, Smollett attorney Tamara Walker began by pointing out a discrepancy between Olabinjo’s testimony about the decision to use bleach and what he’d told a grand jury in 2019.
At the grand jury, Olabinjo testified that he switched the plan from gasoline to bleach so that he wouldn’t be captured on surveillance cameras pouring gas into a container. In his testimony at the trial Thursday, he said he wanted to swap those out for safety reasons.
JFC, why is everyone in this story retarded? I mean I know, but still. It’s like Jequeerus here thought “hmm, you know I’ll look better if I pretend that I was worried about his safety, instead of some logistical problems, so I’ll pretend we switched to bleach for that reason.” And the idea that he would be asked about this discrepancy on stand never crossed his mind.
Walker also confronted Olabinjo with his grand jury testimony that he believed a $3,500 check that Smollett gave them the day before the attack was for a meal and a training plan they’d developed for the actor, not payment for carrying out the hoax.
You can only put a facepalm meme up so many times before it gets old.
The defense has previously tried to paint Olabinjo as a homophobe. In her questioning, Walker asked Olabinjo about a tweet in which he asked someone “why you following Frank Ocean, you know that (epithet) gay, right?”
Ola says he didn’t consider the tweet problematic — just a joke between friends. He also said he didn’t know whether or not Ocean, the popular singer and songwriter, is gay.
You know that nigga gay, is 99.99% what I think he said. In any case, Smollett’s main argument is that these two negroes just absolutely loathed Smollett because he is a little fudgepacker. Of course, he specifically claimed they said “Empire, Faggot, Nigger, MAGA Country,” so I’m not sure why they would do that.
Smollett’s legal argument is, surprise, not being coherently argued by his black lawyer who has already broken down and cried in court. But basically he’s claiming that the two Nigerian Bros wanted to do some violence towards Jussie because he’s a fudgepacker, but they didn’t want to get caught.
So they disguised themselves as KKK members to hide their faces, and “cleverly,” make Jussie think he was attacked by… KKK members in downtown Chicago at 2 AM. And by attacked, I mean they caused a little bit of redness on his neck and left him with some scratches.
The cross-examination of Abimbola Osundairo got off to a dramatic start Thursday morning with the defense suggesting he was secretly dating Smollett — or at least used the “sexual tension” between him and the actor to advance his own career.
From the stand, Osundairo strongly denied that their relationship was romantic, and said he did not believe Smollett had any kind of crush on him.
And in a made-for-TV moment, Allen asked Abimbola Osundairo: “When did you and Jussie start dating?”
“What?” Osundairo said. “We were never dating.”
The two men had sometimes gone to a bathhouse in Boystown together, Osundairo testified on direct examination Wednesday, but said he was unsure whether it was a gay bathhouse.
“Were you using the sexual tension between you to progress your acting career?” Allen asked Thursday.
“I didn’t know there was sexual tension,” Osundairo replied.
Trust me, the bathhouse stuff comes up later when Smollett testifies, and it’s worth the wait. And this part of the story is actually plausible.
Smollett’s lead attorney Nenye Uche has been barred from questioning either brother. In one of the case’s many odd wrinkles, after Uche signed on to the case earlier this year, the Osundairos claimed they had spoken with him about possibly representing them in the early days of the Smollett matter.
Is everything about this case stupid and retarded? Imagine someone so stupid that he hires a lawyer who can’t legally cross-examine the star witnesses because he was in talks to represent them. Well, you don’t have to imagine anymore.
We’re coming up to the drug fueled bathroom orgies. Stay tuned.
