America’s most embarrassing man Jussie Smollett isn't charismatic, he's just cringe

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.

Many careers and reputations fell to pieces in those heady final years of the Trump administration, when cancel culture was at its peak. But Smollett’s downfall is unique by comparison. He doesn’t quite fit the mould of the Hollywood bad-boy type whose delinquent or attention-seeking behaviour has resulted in criminal charges. He is no mere transgressor, nor a mere grifter; he’s a fabulist, which places him at a unique crossroads in the American cultural imagination. For those shameless enough to really commit to the bit, being an audacious liar can command a certain grudging respect. Consider P.T. Barnum, Frank Abagnale, even Donald Trump — each of them an icon in his own right, and all of them utterly full of shit.

Could Smollett have made himself into one of these, doubling down on his fabricated tale of victimhood with the same brazenness with which Trump continues to hammer the “stolen election” narrative? In this paradigm, the sheer ludicrousness of the story would even have been a selling point, and at least some people seem to have been ready to buy in: when Smollett was convicted on five counts of felony disorderly conduct, Black Lives Matter released a statement referring to the entire trial as “a white supremacist charade”, writing: “We can never believe police… over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”

But this coping strategy was not adopted by the majority, for whom the entire thing was, if not forgotten, then very intentionally not discussed. Far from elevating Smollett to folk hero status a la Barnum or Trump, his initial supporters rapidly dispersed. Tweets were quietly deleted, and follow-up statements given grudgingly if at all. Smollett disappeared from the cast of Empire, and the show was cancelled the following season.

At the time of Smollett’s conviction — nearly two years after the story first broke — Wilfred Reilly wrote in UnHerd that the case revealed “an uncomfortable truth about race in America: that the constant exaggeration, or even invention, of incidents of bias by activists and media members is probably a bigger problem than the residual violent racism that still exists”.

Today, this seems truer than ever, in that the primary emotion aroused by Smollett among his former supporters is profound embarrassment. It also may explain why Smollett seems to have little hope of ever working again — if he even wants to, which is also an open question. For the past five years, the actor’s bandwidth has been largely consumed by the doomed project of sticking to his story, to insist on the ending he planned (and paid) for instead of the one he got. He continues to deny any wrongdoing and apparently intends to appeal his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. These efforts may be understandable in a sunk-cost sort of way, but they are also having the opposite of their intended effect: the more he struggles to free himself from the mire of his infamy, the deeper he sinks, and the less sympathetic he becomes. Donald Trump, he is not.

In a parallel-universe, Smollett might have come clean, apologised, and paid restitution as soon as it became clear that his story was bullshit — and after a few dutiful weeks of mockery, we would all moved on to the next thing. In this alternative reality, Smollett is still working; Empire might even be still running. Despite that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about there being no second acts in American lives, the reality of American culture is that we love a good comeback, even, or maybe even especially, after the most humiliating public misstep.

But you have to take your lumps, first, in a way that Smollett has categorically refused to do. His original, much-criticised plea deal eventually fell apart precisely because it included no admission of guilt. His conviction at trial, too, could have been avoided if he’d just owned up to the fabrication. Indeed, however embarrassing the hoax was, it has long since been eclipsed by the cringe-worthy spectacle of Smollett still insisting it happened.

All of this is to Smollett’s detriment — if for no other reason than that it’s to the embarrassment of powerful people whose support he would need most if he wanted to come back. This is what sets the actor apart from someone like Roseanne Barr or Louis C.K., but also someone like Barnum or Trump: in allowing himself to be made foolish, he made fools of his allies, too, duping them into the role of supporting actors in an offensive farce. If he’d been more charismatic, maybe he could have gotten away with this — or if he’d been more apologetic, perhaps he could have been forgiven. But his actual path, the third way, is the worst of both worlds: Smollett diligently continues to spin his wild tale of victimhood, playing the role of the brazen showman… but to an empty house.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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