Chicago police: No footage found yet showing attack on gay, black, Jewish actor

CHICAGO, Ill.  — Detectives have reviewed surveillance footage of “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett walking to a downtown Chicago apartment after an early-morning visit to a Subway restaurant, but none of it showed an attack on the actor, a police official said Wednesday.

Investigators could mostly confirm the route Smollett took early Tuesday when he says he was attacked by two masked men along a street in the Streeterville neighborhood, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. However, there are gaps and none of the footage police had reviewed showed an attack, he said.

Smollett, who is Jewish, black and gay and who plays the gay character Jamal Lyon on the hit Fox television show, said the men beat him, subjected him to racist and homophobic insults, threw an “unknown chemical substance” on him and put a thin rope around his neck before fleeing.

Guglielmi said detectives who are investigating the allegations as a possible hate crime, have looked at hundreds of hours of surveillance video in the heavily monitored area but said they still need to collect and view more.

“We haven’t seen anybody, at this point, matching the description he gave, nobody looks menacing and we didn’t find a container anywhere,” Guglielmi said, referring to a container of the liquid that was thrown at the actor.

Smollett, 36, returned to his apartment and his manager called police from there about 40 minutes later, Guglielmi said. When officers arrived, the actor had cuts and scrapes on his face and the “thin rope” around his neck that he said had been put there by his assailant, he said. Mollett later went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital after police advised him to do so.

The FBI is investigating a threatening letter targeting Smollett that was sent last week to the Fox studio in Chicago where “Empire” is filmed, Guglelmi said. The FBI did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday, but Bobby Rush, a Democratic congressman from Chicago, issued a statement calling on the agency to conduct “an immediate and sweeping civil rights investigation into the racist and homophobic attack.”

In addition to his acting career, Smollett has a musical career and is a noted activist, particularly on LBGT issues.

There has been a flood of outrage and support for Smollett on social media. Among the many celebrities and politicians who weighed in California Sen. Kamala Harris, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful who knows Smollett, personally. She called the attack “outrageous” and “awful.”

Some of the outrage stems from Smollett’s account to detectives that his attackers yelled that he was in “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to the Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, which some critics of the president have decried as racist and discriminatory.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.