A judge must decide whether to send the actor to prison after a jury convicted him last year of falsely reporting that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019.
In January 2019, the star of the musical drama Empire made headlines around the world after it became known that he was attacked by two men, who shouted racial and homophobic abuse at him. A subsequent investigation revealed that he actually paid the two individuals to stage the crime for the sake of promoting his career.
Celebrities are begging a judge to give Jussie Smollett, an actor who was convicted of charges related to engineering a 2019 hate crime hoax, a lenient sentence.