Chicago • 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 "for the most part" can 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 have reviewed shows an attack, he said.
Smollett, who is 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.