The real hoax was never Jussie Smollett. It was the Chicago police.

OPINION: Jussie Smollett’s story makes it easy to get lost in debate. Did he lie? Did he embellish? But let’s be honest: Jussie is a mirror.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

I grew up knowing the difference between a mistake and a pattern. A mistake is a bad night. A pattern is a system. Netflix’s “The Truth About Jussie Smollett” makes you think the story is about him and whether he lied, staged a hoax, or played the media.

That’s the bait.

The real shock isn’t Jussie. The real shock is the Chicago Police Department, a force with hundreds of misconduct complaints, a history of covering up brutality, and a knack for turning Black victims into villains. Forget debating whether Jussie is “believable.” The real debate should be: how can anyone trust the people deciding his fate?

Let’s be clear: the officers tied to Smollett’s case had 563 complaints on their records. Not five. Not fifty. Five hundred sixty-three. If a surgeon had even five malpractice suits, you wouldn’t let them touch a scalpel. If a teacher had dozens of abuse complaints, they’d be banned from classrooms. But in Chicago, hundreds of misconduct complaints don’t end a career; instead, they make you a lead detective. And those same detectives get to decide the fate of a Black man under the glare of national media.

Consider how the investigation unfolded. Security guard Anthony Moore testified that he saw a white or pale-skinned man fleeing the scene. Instead of following that lead, detectives stacked a lineup with only Black men and told Moore to pick “the lightest one.” That isn’t a mistake. That is rigging the outcome. Then there’s the missing footage of ten crucial seconds that vanished from surveillance cameras. Ten seconds. If those seconds disappeared in a case against the police, the evidence would have been thrown out. But here? They were ignored because they didn’t fit the CPD’s story.

And it gets worse. This is Chicago. The same department that covered up the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times while walking away from officers. For over a year, the official story claimed he “lunged” at police with a knife. Dashcam footage later revealed the truth: officers closed ranks to protect one of their own. That wasn’t a mistake. That was a pattern. And if they could bury the truth about a child’s death, why should anyone trust them to get it right in a celebrity case?

Jussie Smollett’s story makes it easy to get lost in debate. Did he lie? Did he embellish? But let’s be honest: Jussie is a mirror. He reflects everything we expect from the media, the public, and the police. We want him to be guilty because it makes us feel smart, because it makes the world orderly. But what if the shock isn’t that Jussie lied? What if the shock is that we are conditioned to trust the people lying to us?

Even the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett’s conviction, ruling that prosecutors violated his due process rights. That should have sparked outrage. Instead, the world shrugged, joked, and argued over whether Jussie was “worth believing.” We missed the real scandal is that the system that judged him is built to win, not to tell the truth.

I know this playbook. I grew up in the Bronx, stopped and searched, and was lied on by police. I’ve lived the reality where an officer’s word outweighs yours, where their version becomes fact, and your own memory becomes fiction. Watching this documentary, I can’t focus on Jussie’s honesty alone. The bigger question is: why do we keep trusting a system with a long track record of abuse and deception?

The real story is not Jussie Smollett. It is the fact that the people judging him were Chicago police officers with 563 misconduct complaints, missing evidence, and a decades-long record of lying and covering up brutality. Yet they were still allowed to control the narrative. That is the real hoax.

Arguing about whether Jussie was truthful is a distraction. The real question is why we keep trusting a system that was never built to deliver truth in the first place. In Chicago, mistakes are ignored. Patterns are protected. Corruption is routine. This is not about one man. It is about a system that has proven over and over again that it cannot be trusted with Black lives. The real lie is the system itself.

Jonathan Conyers is the author of the acclaimed memoir I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here. He is also a respiratory therapist, writer, and producer, as well as the owner and investor of several successful business ventures. Through his storytelling and work, Conyers continues to amplify underrepresented voices and create impact across industries.