Queen Latifah still supports Jussie Smollett despite his legal troubles.
The Star actress believes Smollett is above staging a hate crime on himself and told Yahoo she wants to see the receipts before she jumped to conclusions. Latifah met Smollett when she guest-starred on an episode of Empire to promote her show last year.
“The guy I’ve seen has always been someone who cares about people, who cares about others, and who’s very kind and who’s always been cool and sweet,” the actress said. “And that’s just the guy I know. So, until I can see some definitive proof — which I haven’t seen yet — then, you know, I gotta go with him until I see otherwise.”
Smollett was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after Ola and Abel Osundairo said they were paid to stage a hate crime, as Blavity reported.
Queen admitted she’s experienced conflicting feelings about the supposed hoax but remains hopeful.
“I don’t even know what to make of it,” she said. “All I know is that I hope everything works out in the end and everybody basically comes out unscathed.”
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Queen Latifah isn’t the only one with Smollett on her mind.
Journalist Robin Roberts recently expressed her feelings about her infamous interview with the Empire star in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Roberts confessed she was reluctant to interview Smollett unless he said something “newsworthy.”
"If there wasn't going to be anything new, I didn't really want to do it," she said.
Roberts also discussed having to walk a fine line as a Black lesbian interviewing a Black gay man about an alleged hate crime.
"If I'm too hard on him, then people in my LGBTQ community are going, 'Oh, you don't believe him,'" the journalist said. "If I'm too light on him, then it's like, 'Oh, because you are in the community, you're giving him a pass.' So it was, like, it was a no-win situation for me."
Still, Roberts would have asked the hard questions if she’d known about the Osundairo brothers’ testimony.
"Had I had that information or what the brothers were alleging — heck, yeah, I would have asked that,” she said. “But it aired that morning [and] we taped it two days ahead of time."
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