Empire star Jussie Smollett is set to be sued by the city of Chicago after refusing to pay more than $130,000 to cover the costs of the investigation into his allegedly staged racist, anti-gay attack.
City officials had sent Smollett a bill for $130,106.15 in overtime costs that were incurred after he claimed to have been the victim of a violent hate crime, only to be charged with lying to police and orchestrating the attack himself.
Smollett was eventually indicted by a grand jury on 16 counts, including filing a false police report.
The charges, however, were suddenly dropped on March 26 by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which cited Smollett’s lack of danger to the public, his community service, and forfeiture of $10,000 in bail.
A spokesperson for Chicago’s Department of Law said Smollett refused to reimburse the city, and attorneys for the city were now preparing for a civil lawsuit against the Empire actor.
“The Law Department will file the suit in the near future,” Bill McCaffrey, a spokesperson for the department, said in a statement. “As part of this legal action, the Law Department will pursue the full measure of damages allowed under the ordinance.”
According to the city ordinance, anyone who files a false report can face a $500 fee, plus “up to three times the amount of damages the city sustains,” including court, collection, and attorney costs.
Smollett, who is black and gay, allegedly hired two brothers to stage an assault on him and make it look like a hate crime, police and prosecutors say.
The actor told investigators that his attackers yelled homophobic and racist slurs at him as well as screamed “This is MAGA country,” a reference to President Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan.
Police accrued hundreds of hours in overtime as they investigated the Jan. 29 alleged assault before they said they learned that the actor had paid the brothers — men he knew from the “Empire” set — to stage the attack.
The city’s legal department announced the intention to sue as Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — who has been under fire since her office announced it was dropping charges against Smollett — faced calls to step down today from suburban police chiefs and the Chicago police union.
The heads of three suburban Chicago police chiefs’ associations, which represent dozens of chiefs throughout the area, said today they took “no confidence” votes against Foxx this week.
All three organizations voted for Foxx, who as Cook County State’s Attorney oversees prosecutions in the city of Chicago and inner ring suburbs, to resign.
About 30 suburban police chiefs announced the associations’ call for Foxx to step down at a news conference organized by the union.
Kevin Graham, the Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police’s president, said that the Smollett case was the last straw in a long list of grievances that members of the city’s 13,000 officer police force have had with how Foxx has carried out her duties since being elected in 2016.
He cited officers’ frustration that Foxx was too frequently allowing suspects who allegedly assaulted police officers to be let go without being charged.
“This didn’t start with Jussie Smollett,” Graham said. “This started when we wanted to try and make sure that when officers received a battery in the performance of their duties that the felony charges would be placed. And we continually had problems getting those charges approved.”