Actor Jussie Smollett, widely known for his role in 'Empire', has been sentenced to five months in jail for staging a hate crime scene.
Smollett was found guilty of falsely telling police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019, an attack prosecutors said he himself staged.
The judge also sentenced Smollett to 30 months of felony probation and ordered that he pay $120,106 in restitution to the city of Chicago and a $25,000 fine.
After the jail term was announced, the actor insisted that he was not suicidal, suggesting that ‘if anything happens’ to him in jail, he did not take his own life.
During the sentencing, the actor's lawyer also argued for a new trial for Smollett. However, the judge denied the request.
Smollett was originally indicted in March 2019 with 16 counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false report, claiming that, while on his way home from a sandwich shop, two men attacked him late at night.
Those charges were dropped later that same month. The case against him was later revived by a special prosecutor, Dan Webb, and in early 2020, Smollett was once again charged with disorderly conduct.
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