Police: No footage yet showing 'Empire' actor being attacked
CHICAGO (AP) — 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. There are gaps, however, and none of the footage police have reviewed shows an attack, he said, noting that the review is ongoing.
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.
Guglielmi said detectives who are investigating the allegations as a possible hate crime have looked at hundreds of hours of surveillance video from businesses and hotels in the heavily monitored area.
But he said they still need to collect and view more. He said they are expanding the search to include footage from public buses and buildings beyond the scene's immediate vicinity in the hopes of spotting the men who match Smollett's description of the suspects.
"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 for the liquid that the actor said was thrown at him.
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. Smollett later went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital after police advised him to do so.