In that video footage Smollett - with his face blurred - is seen wearing a white rope that he told detectives his attackers looped around his neck. When one of the officers asked Smollett if he wanted to take the rope off of his neck, the 37-year-old actor did while stating: "Yeah. I do. I just wanted you all to see it,” adding that “they poured bleach on me.”
“There’s bleach on me. They poured bleach on me,” Jussie Smollett told police the night of the alleged attack in Chicago. “Do you want to take it off or anything?” Chicago police officer asks Jussie Smollett about the rope around his neck. https://t.co/4mmKwNVaBb pic.twitter.com/WfsuKc3PrW
— CBS Chicago (@cbschicago) 24 июня 2019 г.
Investigators went on to tell him that they were recording the visit, to which he said: “I don’t want to be filmed," after which the officers turned off their body cams.
Many files contained surveillance-camera footage that police collected as they launched what they initially called a hate-crime investigation. They also included footage from what appeared to be the route police said the two brothers who participated in the alleged staged January attack took to and from the scene.
Smollett was accused of filing a false police report about a hate crime. Smollett told the police that he was attacked by two masked men who he said doused him with a chemical substance and placed a thin rope around his neck. He also said that the attackers were shouting, “This is MAGA country!” before fleeing. However, Chicago police said after interviewing two brothers identified as persons of interest in the case that Smollett paid the duo $3,500 to orchestrate the attack.
