Jussie’s tale was fake, but it did real damage

DON’T let anyone tell you the Jussie Smollett trial, which opened on Monday, is overblown, prosecutorial overreach, shouldn’t be happening or doesn’t matter. It matters. A lot.

As does the way Smollett’s claims were treated by the media.

No matter how outlandish his story was — and it was a whopper — the mainstream media and Hollywood’s social-justice warriors lapped it up as proof of America’s intractable racism and homophobia.

Yet, as we soon learned, Smollett, who is black and gay, staged the attack to get a raise on his soon-to-be-canceled TV show, “Empire.”

Only Dave Chappelle expertly vivisected Smollett’s story, contrasting Hollywood’s immediate outrage with the African-American community’s silence in his 2019 Netflix special, “Sticks & Stones”:

“What they didn’t understand is that we were supporting him with our silence . . . Because we understood that [he] was clearly lying. None of these details added up at all . . . If you a racist and homophobic, you don’t even know who [he] is! You don’t watch ‘Empire’!”

Chappelle went on to mock the likelihood of anyone going out in minus-16-degree weather at 2 a.m. to walk to a Subway for sandwiches, only to be assaulted by two men wearing MAGA caps — in Chicago!

Smollett told the cops he thought his assailants were white, the MAGA caps a dead giveaway.

“Not only were they not white,” Chappelle said, “they were very, very black. They were Nigerian, which is the funniest s- -t. The whole story is funnier now!”

Yet here was ABC’s Robin Roberts — two weeks after Smollett’s story began falling apart and two weeks before Chicago police publicly called it a hoax — nodding somberly as Smollett lied and lied through a two-part “Good Morning America” interview, which also became an entire episode of “Nightline.”

Roberts: “If the attackers are never found” — that is, the two Nigerian brothers whom Smollett paid to stage the assault — “how will you be able to heal?”

Smollett: “Um, I don’t know.” He began to cry and sniffle, his greatest performance ever. “I understand how difficult it will be to find them.”

It wasn’t that difficult. By the time this interview aired on Feb. 13, 2019 — two weeks after the faked Jan. 29 attack — police had the brothers in custody.

But Smollett had no idea that the cops were suspicious of him from the very beginning. He was too caught up in a new kind of fame, that of an emerging civilrights martyr and gay-rights icon.

“I want a little gay boy who might watch this,” Smollett told Roberts, “to see that I fought back.”

You can’t write self-pitying-slash-aggrandizing dialogue better than that.

Smollett also told Roberts that any doubts about his story were just proof of America’s love affair with white supremacy.

“At first it was a thing of, like, if I tell the truth . . . how can you doubt that? How do you not believe that? It’s the truth! And then it became a thing of, like, oh, it’s not necessarily that you don’t believe that this is the truth, you don’t even want to see the truth.”

This is to say nothing of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx suddenly dropping all 16 felony charges against Smollett — after a call from Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff — even though Foxx texted her staff that Smollett was a “washed up celeb who lied to cops.”

The charges, Foxx told her staff, were too severe.

Really? How about the $130,000 this investigation cost Chicago’s police department in overtime — which Smollett refuses to pay back? Or the manpower diverted from other real crimes, the harm done to the credibility of other real victims, the second thoughts they might have of even reporting such attacks?

Or a little thing called race relations? There are very real consequences here. Yet Jussie Smollett, like his ignominious predecessors Crystal Mangum and Tawana Brawley, smirkingly maintains that he is telling the truth.

If he had any self-awareness at all, he’d realize things didn’t work out so well for either Mangum or Brawley.

But like all narcissistic sociopaths — so many of them on parade these days — he doesn’t.

As Smollett told Roberts, “I still want to believe, with everything that’s happened, that there’s something called justice.”

Here’s hoping.