Superintendent Eddie Johnson. (Photo source: Chicago Police Department, chicagopolice.org)
It seems unfathomable today, but Jussie Smollett could have avoided being arrested as well as enduring the public humiliation, the widespread condemnation, the exile from Hollywood and being convicted of several felonies in a court of law.
All Smollett had to do was apologize. At least that’s what former Chicago Police Chief Eddie Johnson asserts. Smollett did not do offer a mea culpa to investigators for staging a fake beatdown, and now his career and immediate future lie in utter ruins.
“I want people to understand this. This was not the most heinous crime of the century. He didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t blow up a building,” Johnson, who headed the Chicago Police Department in 2019, explained to “NewsNation’s Morning in America.”
“We would have been more than happy with just an apology at the end of all that we uncovered. But for some reason, he just wanted to keep going down this road that he was actually a victim.”
Smollett was found guilty of five of the six felony charges related to filing a false police report and repeatedly lying to authorities.
Quite simply, neither the jury nor the police, prosecutors, or the public believed Smollett’s account of what took place on that frigid night of Jan. 28, 2019, in downtown Chicago.
Flip the page to learn the things that tipped Johnson and the other Chicago investigators off that Smollett was lying.
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