Brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo said they pretended to attack Empire star Jussie Smollett but never expected the phony homophobic hate crime to gain the widespread attention that it has.
“I want to apologize to everyone in the audience, the country, and anyone who might have been affected by this directly. When we were asked to partake in this, we really didn’t foresee the ramifications of what something like this could do to the country,” Olabinjo told Hannity. “We allowed our ambition to cloud our judgment.”
JUSSIE SMOLLETT APPEALS HATE CRIME HOAX CONVICTION
Olabinjo added that they agreed to participate because Smollett promised to help further their careers.
“Jussie was in a position where he could help us because, in the acting world, it’s who you know, not what you know,” Abimbola said. “So us helping him out would have helped us.”
Smollett is maintaining his innocence concerning lies made to police over the staged hate crime in 2019, saying, “If I had done this, I’d be a piece of s***.”
The disgraced actor was released in March 2022 on bond after spending only six of his original 150-day sentence in jail pending an appeal of his guilty verdict.
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Earlier this month, Smollett filed his appeal, alleging that the “prosecutorial misconduct” in his case was “clear and egregious.”
The Osundairo brothers explained how they carried out the planned attack in a new Fox Nation docuseries Jussie Smollett: Anatomy of a Hoax.