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Liam rules out race in old pursuit
Actor Jussie Smollett was initially reluctant to report that he was the victim of a racial attack at the hands of two men last month in Chicago.
Smollett, the 36-year-old musician and actor who appears on the show Empire, told the police that he was accosted on the street at 2am on January 29.
A television station obtained a partially redacted copy of the report through a Freedom of Information Request on Monday, reports variety.com.
According to the report, the officers were told that Smollett “did not want to report the offence however he believed it to be in the best interest to”.
The report states that police found Smollett with a white rope around his neck, and that he stated the attackers threw an unknown chemical substance on him, staining his clothes. Smollett said he was accosted by two men dressed in black, one of whom was wearing a ski mask. He did not remember any other details.
Chicago Police have reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance footage in an effort to find the attackers, but have not found video of the attack. The department released an image of two “persons of interest” in the case on January 30.
Smollett performed on February 2 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, during which he sought to clarify some details of the incident.
“I was bruised but my ribs were not cracked; they were not broken. I went to the doctor immediately... I was not hospitalised. And above all — I fought the f**k back,”he said on stage.
After confessing that he once set out to attack a random black man after a friend of his told him she had been raped, actor Liam Neeson insisted that he was not racist, on Tuesday.
“I’m not a racist,” Neeson said on ABC News, while admitting he had felt a “primal urge to lash out” about 40 years ago after hearing from his close friend that she had been attacked by a black man.
The 66-year-old star of Schindler’s List (1993) triggered international backlash by sharing his story in an interview with The Independent. And in damage control mode on ABC’s Good Morning America, the Northern Irish actor expanded on the incident, which he said left him shocked at himself.
“I went out deliberately into black areas in the city, looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence,” Neeson recalled. “I did it four — maybe four or five — times until I caught myself and it really shocked me, this primal urge,” he had revealed.
While Neeson says no violence ultimately occurred, the actor said he sought help from a Catholic priest, spoke to friends, and walked for hours to rid himself of the episode. In the bombshell interview, he spoke of “hoping some black b ***** d would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could... kill him.”
But he also insisted race was not the driving factor behind his actions. “If she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian, I know it would have had the same effect,” he said. “I was trying to show honour and stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion.” By way of explanation, he also pointed to his experience growing up in Northern Ireland, at the time locked in a deadly cycle of sectarian violence pitting Catholics against Protestants.
Neeson first revealed the incident to The Independent in an interview to promote his new thriller Cold Pursuit, about a father seeking revenge after his son is murdered by a drug gang.
Neeson’s acting career spans five decades, including a star turn in the 2008 hit Taken — about a former CIA agent trying to track down his kidnapped daughter.
With his own revelations now threatening to derail his career, Neeson pleaded for his story to be taken as part of a broader, honest debate on race relations. “We all pretend we’re all politically correct,” he said. “Sometimes you scratch the surface and discover this racism and bigotry, and it’s there,” he added.