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The lawsuit accused Smollett, who has a prominent role on the show “Empire,” of orchestrating a fake assault in January and repeatedly lying to members of the Chicago Police Department as they investigated the case. City lawyers repeated many of the claims that had been made by prosecutors before criminal charges against the actor were abruptly dropped in March.
“Defendant made this report to the CPD officers despite knowing that the purported attack was not for racist or homophobic motives” and “that his purported attackers were, in fact, his acquaintances,” said the lawsuit, which was filed in state court.
In all, city officials said, more than two dozen officers worked a combined 1,836 overtime hours on the case, costing just over $130,000.
A spokeswoman for Smollett’s lawyers declined to comment Thursday evening, but the actor has insisted all along that he told the truth about what happened to him in the early morning hours of Jan. 29. Earlier, Smollett’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, had rejected the city’s request to pay for the cost of the investigation and had brushed aside the threat of a lawsuit.
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The lawsuit, which Chicago officials had threatened for days, signaled another escalation of the strange, bitter saga that followed Smollett’s initial report to police. For weeks, detectives investigated a claim by Smollett, who is gay and black, that he had been confronted in the early morning hours by two men who placed a rope around his neck, poured a chemical on him and used the phrase “MAGA Country,” a reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.
But after initial outpourings of outrage, including from Democratic presidential candidates and Trump, skepticism about Smollett’s account began to grow. Eventually, Chicago police detained two brothers who knew Smollett and who said the actor had paid them to plan and carry out a fake hate crime.
Smollett was arrested and eventually indicted by a grand jury on 16 counts of disorderly conduct. But in another surprising turn, Cook County prosecutors dropped those charges in March. Smollett agreed to forfeit his $10,000 bond payment. Prosecutors then took the unusual step of saying that their decision to drop the charges “didn’t exonerate him.”
Some Chicago leaders, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, voiced outrage at the decision, calling it a “whitewash of justice.”
“Our officers did hard work, day in and day out, countless hours, working to unwind what actually happened that night,” Emanuel said in March. “The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud.”
The city’s largest police union soon called for the elected prosecutor, Kim Foxx, to resign. All the while, explanations for the prosecution decision were shifting. At first, prosecutors said they were exercising discretion in part because Smollett’s crime was a relatively low-level felony. Later, Foxx, who had assigned the case to her deputy, said there were doubts about whether the evidence was strong enough for a conviction.
In a letter last week to a city lawyer, Geragos said Smollett had been wrongly accused of a crime and that the threats of a lawsuit “were made maliciously.” And if that lawsuit were filed, Geragos said, he would seek depositions with Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.