Posted by Bluangel on February 11, 2020, 5:16 pm, in reply to "Just in .."
CHICAGO (CBS) — Actor Jussie Smollett has been indicted on six new charges of disorderly conduct, accusing him of filing false police reports claiming he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack last year.
A special Cook County grand jury handed down the new indictment on Tuesday, following a six-month investigation by special prosecutor Dan Webb.
In a statement, Webb’s office said Smollett filed four separate false police reports claiming he was the victim of a hate crime.
“The grand jury’s investigation revealed that Jussie Smollett planned and participated in a staged hate crime attack, and thereafter made numerous false statements to Chicago Police Department officers on multiple occasions, reporting a heinous hate crime that he, in fact, knew had not occurred,” Webb said in a statement.
Cook County prosecutors last year dropped 16 disorderly conduct charges against Smollett, just over a month after Chicago police had accused him of orchestrating a hoax because he was upset with his salary on the TV show “Empire.”
Last August, Cook County Judge Michael Toomin appointed Webb, a former federal prosecutor, as a special prosecutor in the Smollett case; tasking him to not only investigate Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the case, but to decide if Smollett should be further prosecuted for allegedly staging a fake hate crime against himself.
In a statement on the new Smollett indictment, Webb wrote that his office “obtained sufficient factual evidence to determine that it disagrees with how the CCSAO resolved the Smollett case.”
Webb said the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office could not provide him with any evidence that the decision last year to dismiss the charges against Smollett was handled similar to other cases.
“The CCSAO has been unable to provide the [Office of the Special Prosecutor] with documentary evidence that shows that, in dismissing the Smollett case on the terms presented in court on March 26, 2019, the CCSAO relied on other dispositions of similar cases prior to the Smollett case that would justify this disposition,” Webb wrote.
on February 11, 2020, 5:16 pm, in reply to "