Names and faces
■ Former Empire actor Jussie Smollett pleaded innocent Monday to restored charges accusing him of staging a racist, homophobic attack against himself last year in Chicago and falsely reporting to police that the phony attack was real. A somber looking Smollett, 37, entered the Cook County courthouse wearing sunglasses and sporting a beard, flanked by his legal team and surrounded by reporters. His lawyer, Tina Glandian, entered the pleas on his behalf to six counts of felony disorderly conduct. Smollett has repeatedly denied police allegations that he staged the attack to get attention and further his career. Glandian also told Judge James B. Linn that she has asked the Illinois Supreme Court to halt the case. Last year, Smollett pleaded innocent to 16 counts of the charge in the same courthouse last year, just weeks before the Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office abruptly announced it was dismissing the case. Smollett’s attorneys also have filed a motion in Cook County court arguing that the refiling of charges violated protections against being charged twice for the same crime.
■ The museum of the Nazi German Auschwitz death camp is objecting to a scene in a new Amazon TV series that shows a murderous game of human chess being played there, insisting that no such thing took place at the camp. The museum and memorial that guard the Auschwitz-Birkenau site in southern Poland, its historic facts and the memory of the victims tweeted about the scene in Amazon’s series Hunters. It said inventing fake scenes is “dangerous foolishness and caricature,” encourages Holocaust deniers and is disrespectful of the camp’s some 1.1 million victims, including women and children. However, the series’ creator, David Weil stressed in a statement the show is not a documentary but a narrative with largely fictional characters. Hunters is about a postwar hunt in New York for Nazi war criminals. It includes a scene where Auschwitz inmates are figures in a chess game and are killed when they are taken off the chessboard. Weil said that as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, he is careful not to “misrepresent a real person or borrow from a specific moment in an actual person’s life.” Weil, who is also the Hunters executive producer, said he used this “fictionalized event” to showcase the “most extreme … sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims.”