the Jussie Smollett incident - what say you wordforge?

Bill Cosby is currently--and deservedly--sitting in a jail cell, and he was to comedy what Michael Jackson was to pop music in the 80s.

If even he got put away, you can be sure Smollet's getting locked up too. Especially since this didn't occur in LA County that always let's actors walk.

Let's hope so, eh?

That's fine so long as other parties aren't being named in the accusation. Then you're condemning an innocent person, or in this case, an entire group of people of something they didn't do. We see that often with posters here. They're ready to condemn the accused before any real investigation has been started because it's what they want to believe. It's wrong.

Whatever plays best to their base at the moment, that will be the direction that they go .

I wouldn't go so far as to call him a "failing actor." Getting written out of shows is par for the course as an actor - it happens a lot and it's an occupational hazard. You can man up or be a pussy when it happens. I guess Smollett chose the latter. He made a challenging situation much worse.

latest reports say Smollett will get probation at the most. His lawyer(s) will still be able to bleed him dry easier that way!

Call me an optimist, but I think most people are smart enough to know that Smollett is not the typical "victim without a cause" and that they won't broad-brush all victim claims as being fake or overblown by default.

My only advice to victims in any situation is don't wait until years after you were victimized to report it. It plants seeds of doubt, and solid evidence & testimony are often long gone by that point.

Looking for some white guys who yell out MAGA taunts is really not something that was going to help investigators at all. That would not even make probable cause for a search warrant. This is why the police, doing their job, found the brothers because they were in the area and the police did not take unreliable information to be the limits of their investigation. There was never any threat to any MAGAts having legal troubles over any of this.

Most victims' claims are legit.

Some are not.

All must be reviewed skeptically.

Feds Are Investigating If Jussie Smollett Played Role in Sending Threatening Letter to Himself

The hits just keep coming.

Smollett better hope that letter can't be tied to him, or he's going to have a lot more than Chicago PD to worry about.

The FBI has probably already matched the letters in the letter to the magazines COD collected at the house.

And the brothers probably rolled on Smollet on this issue too because federal charges are far worse than the state charges they’d all be facing.

B'bye, Jussie.

If you automatically believe someone you're automatically calling another person a criminal. I'd rather let both sides have their say rather than siding with one or the other. It's just common sense.

Smollett threat letter called "enormous mistake"; Purported attack location identified; Federal charges "certain"

On Friday, Jan. 18th, a letter was dropped into a mailbox in Chicago’s southwest suburbs.

....

Four days later and about eleven miles away, the letter found its way to Smollett.

....

Whoever sent the letter to Smollett may have considered the mail to be an untraceable way to deliver a message. They’d be mistaken.

“Those postal guys are the real deal,” said a North Side cop who worked with inspectors on a serial package theft case in Lincoln Park last November. “They can do amazing things and aren’t afraid of the work.”

Since being created by Benjamin Franklin—yes, that Benjamin Franklin—the service has learned a few things about tracing mail-based crimes. Figuring out who mailed a letter has been made easier because, while most criminals know to wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, most criminals also forget to leave their cellphones at home when they go to the mailbox.

....

Even without tracking phones, inspectors have a catalogue of techniques developed over the course of 200 years to track a letter to its source. More than 1,000 “white powder” cases were investigated between January 2007 and March 2009 alone, according the LA Times.

.....

Meanwhile, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has been quietly working on the origins of Smollett’s letter for nearly a month. Giving it far more “attention” than he knew.

Late Monday, CWBChicago received confirmation that the letter case has been before a federal grand jury and multiple subpoenas have been generated over the course of the investigation.

In a conversation on Feb. 8th, before police met with brothers Ola and Abel Osundairo, a leading source within the Smollett attack investigation called the hate crime a "false flag" and said “There is a direct line between (the letter) and (the purported attack)." In the same conversation, the source hinted at what was to come: "This is not a whodunit. It's a how-many-people-dunit."

Whoever mailed the letter "made an enormous mistake," we were told. Federal charges were "certain."

....

“If they have Smollett on the letter, he’ll be facing ’terroristic hoax’ charges, a felony. There may be federal obstruction charges as well.”

All in all, the federal legal options are numerous: “If they want to bury him, they can.”

....



"Hey asshole, did you put that letter in the mailbox?"

(It doesn't really say that but their faces do )

https://www.cwbchicago.com/2019/02/smollett-threat-letter-called-enormous.html

This just in - in 2007 in Los Angeles Smollett pled guilty to DUI, driving without a license and.....wait for it....providing false information to the police! Personally I don't feel mailing a threatening letter to yourself and the white powder being aspirin should be that big a deal, but after September 11 and the fact that the Feds may have been spending some effort on the letter before the whole attack played out? The Feds might just try to get their money's worth on Smollett. I think his lawyer quit too (or maybe the two brothers' lawyer) because she might already know some of the people who might be interviewed - conflict of interest and all that. CAVEAT I caught the lawyer quitting thing on the news while I was getting ready for work, so you'll have to google that. Oh and Jussie has declined the cops invitation for further interviews for two days now - I'm thinking further invitations might involve a subpoena or hand cuffs, so he might want to make room in his crowded schedule to "do lunch" with the cops.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/enter...ussie-Smollett-2007-DUI-arrest-506058301.html

This. It's easy enough to manage because we understand that humans are prone to error, so believing that the victim experienced a trauma while also withholding judgment on the accused is simple.

All decisions should be based upon evidence not feelings. That is where John goes wrong.

So I posted this in the wrong thread before.
I heard this on Fox, so take it what you will, but they claim that, because of his record, he’ll get probation at best.

I knew it was all BS once I heard the claim that the two "assailants" were wearing MAGA hats. Trump supporters do not openly wear MAGA hats in Chicago.

And Chicago isn't exactly MAGA country.

It won't be probation.

Besides fucking with Chicago he fucked with the Feds.

He'll get something if he's convicted. Especially on the Fed side of things. It won't be the max but given how this story is national now the Feds will not want to let him slide out with just probation.

Given how he's humiliated everyone associated with his show who supported him, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if his career is a bit, uh, curtailed. There are already reports about his participation in Empire being reduced.

Video obtained of the Nigerian brothers buying the equipment used in the Smollett "attack."

CBS Chicago Linkage

Edit: one of the brothers uses his phone during the purchase...I'm guessing that helped police narrow down which store at what time...

People really don’t understand how cellphones and in particular smart phones with a GPS chip in them have made law enforcement’s job easier to solve cases.

We have all willingly planted a bug on us by carrying our phones everywhere.