Are You Ready for the Return of Jussie Smollett?

Jussie Smollett has a new album coming out and is trying to revive his music and acting career. Variety published a lengthy story about him yesterday and the gist is that he’s sticking to his story about being attacked by MAGA racists in freezing cold Chicago despite all the evidence to the contrary.

“The villains are the two people who assaulted me, the Chicago Police Department and, if I may be so brave, the mayor,” he says. He’s referencing Rahm Emanuel, who held the city’s top job from 2011 to 2019 and is the brother of Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel.

Smollett is making forays into rebooting his career as an actor, a director and a recording artist. But to do so, he needs to clear up this case, or at least attempt to: We’re speaking just after news broke of a new documentary, “The Truth About Jussie Smollett?,” which will stream on Netflix on Aug. 22 and features an interview with Smollett. The former “Empire” star says that the Chicago establishment conspired to frame him: He claims he experienced a hate crime, one that the world came to believe he faked.

This is the first I’d heard about the new Netflix special and based on this description I’m not looking forward to it. 

“The Truth About Jussie Smollett?” will premiere on Aug. 22, and it features interviews with police, lawyers, journalists and investigators who claim to have “new evidence about the case.” According to Netflix’s logline, the 90-minute doc tells the “shocking true story of an allegedly fake story that some now say might just be a true story.”

Nope, sorry. It’s definitely a fake story. The two men who carried out the attack admitted it. They were caught on camera buying the supplies. Their precise movements to and from the scene of the crime were identified, proving they were there. They wrote a book about it complete with text messages about the plan. So what does Jussie Smollett have to explain all this away? Not much.

Now, Smollett is getting worked up as he holds fast to his original story that two MAGA supporters wearing masks shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him before putting a noose around his neck and splashing him with bleach on a frigid night. He is speaking via Zoom from London; it’s a follow-up to a lengthy sit-down in Los Angeles. My first meeting with Smollett had ended on a cliff-hanger, as he was working up to discuss his innocence. Now he’s finally ready. He won’t directly criticize the brothers, who wrote the book “Bigger Than Jussie: The Disturbing Need for a Modern-Day Lynching” and have popped up on Fox News. But he also maintains that they weren’t the attackers, as they testified under oath.

“All I can say is, God bless you, and I hope it was worth it,” he says. “Every single other person’s story has changed multiple times. Mine has never. I have nothing to gain from this.”

It really is amazing that the best thing Smollett can say in his own defense is that it’s hard to believe anyone could be stupid enough and greedy enough to go through with this plan. And yet, it happened. And the effort to revive his story is still going on. Here’s the trailer for the Netflix special.

As a business move it makes sense because I can tell you I will definitely be watching this. Lots of people probably will. Meanwhile, thanks to his conviction being overturned, Smollett is trying to rebuild his personal empire. So far it seems to be working.

Smollett recently signed a deal with Rowdy Records. His lead single, also called “Break Out,” dropped on Aug. 12, with the full album launching in late September. He’s back in the fold at Fox — the very network that unceremoniously bounced him amid his legal troubles — as a cast member of the new season of reality endurance show “Special Forces,” which begins airing on Sept. 25. Eight days before this interview, the tearjerker family drama “The Lost Holliday,” which he directed, co-wrote, produced and starred in, hit streaming platform Tubi and racked up 800,000 views in its first 72 hours, according to Smollett…

“I saw firsthand how narratives are built. I saw firsthand the way that someone can take the exact opposite of who you are and literally sell it,” he says of his vilification. “And people will be like, ‘I believe it!’ God rest his soul, but homeboy Michael Jackson tried to warn us.”

I think the best thing you can say about Jussie Smollett is that he’s a terrible liar. I don’t know who is going to fall for his innocence act at this point but I guess he doesn’t need everyone on his side, just enough people to buy his albums and watch his movies.