{"id":167432,"date":"2025-08-22T21:10:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T21:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167432\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T21:10:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T21:10:10","slug":"youve-already-decided-how-you-feel-about-the-jussie-smollett-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167432\/","title":{"rendered":"You’ve already decided how you feel about the Jussie Smollett doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone throwing on the cheaply made true-crime documentaries that flood streaming services know that these films trade in sensation rather than investigation. Whether they\u2019re injecting a hit of schadenfreude around a public disaster<\/a> or rubbernecking its leering gaze at a gross tabloid story<\/a>, these movies are about reliving scandal, not understanding it. These movies rely on something I call Doccam\u2019s Razor: The simplest solution to a true-crime case is not the reason we\u2019re watching the documentary about it.<\/p>\n

Without the journalistic aspirations of their genre predecessors<\/a>, these filmmakers simply spend 90 minutes rehashing topics that went viral because of how widely they were covered and discussed at the time. The better you know the stories, the more transparent these disposable docs\u2019 biases become. And yet, sometimes a doc is so content to coast on name recognition that its incurious construction only emphasizes the Rorschach test of its central case. This is how The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, a film whose very title can\u2019t take a stand, presents its Chicago-set scandal: Not as a strange hoax that\u2019s only become clearer in the past six years, but as a war still raging between politically charged forces. In this way, the film really does make its audience relive a scandal that relied less on truth than on ideology and emotion.<\/p>\n

The 2019 incident where Empire actor Jussie Smollett reported that he was the victim of a hate crime in downtown Chicago, attacked by two white men spewing slurs and draping a noose around his neck, has been litigated to a perfectly unsatisfying conclusion. In November 2024, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned<\/a> Smollett\u2019s five convictions for making false police reports, but not because it had determined his innocence. Rather, it was because Smollett had previously made a deal with prosecutor Kim Foxx\u2019s office, exchanging a few hours of community service and a $10,000 bond for them dropping all charges. That he was later retried for the same offenses violated his due process, the court determined. So he was originally found guilty, but never really exonerated\u2014a perfect gray area for a documentary to dig into.<\/p>\n

This is not what The Truth About Jussie Smollett? does. Much like its subject matter and many of its true-crime peers, the film crackles with charged preconceived notions, and it delights in rubbing them together like staticky balloons. From the moment Smollett claimed he was attacked by guys shouting about \u201cMAGA country,\u201d simple lines were drawn in the sand. Political figures from both parties condemned the attack, from Kamala Harris to then-and-now President Donald Trump. But when the Chicago police determined that, hang on, none of this is adding up, Trump was quick to gloat. A gay Black actor is the bad guy? And there\u2019s (fictional) violence in Chicago? And the Democratic city\u2019s workers look like fools? And MAGA chuds have been falsely blamed? It\u2019s like a Project 2025 fairy tale.<\/p>\n