Nigerian Brothers Paid $3,500 By US Actor Jussie Smollett To Attack Him Break Their Silence

The brothers paid by actor Jussie Smollett to carry out a staged attack on him have broken their silence in a bombshell interview – set to air days after the Empire star sought to clear his name by appealing a guilty verdict arrived in 2021.

Smollett paid Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo $3,500 to stage the January 2019 attack on the streets of Chicago as an apparent hate crime, in a shameless bid to coax sympathy from the public.

The plot came to light after the brothers, a pair of aspiring actors from Nigeria, confessed the mugging was a hoax after nearly two days in a Chicago lockup.

Now speaking for the first time, they slammed Smollett as a ‘crazy fraudster’ who paid them for the ambush so he could be heralded as a ‘poster boy for activism.’

They revealed they decided to take up Smollett’s bizarre offer to beat him up because they thought he would, in turn, help their career.

Speaking about how the actor consistently lied and tried to play innocent after the hoax, the brothers told Fox Nation: ‘Insane. That’s when I really saw a different side of Jussie. Like, dude, really? This is when I knew that this dude was like a super villain.’

The brothers revealed they met their then-friend Smollett an hour before carrying out the staged attack – and the actor later hung them out to dry when his web of lies began to unravel.

Both Osundairo brothers said they now feel ‘betrayed’ by the actor, who attempted to saddle them with the blame during subsequent hearings in court.

The pair slammed the Empire actor as a ‘crazy fraudster’ who ‘to this day, has not come out to say the truth’.

‘I thought he was a good actor, but I also thought this guy was a fraud,’ said Amibola of Smollett’s continued attitude toward the incident, which has remained unchanged since his 2021 trial.

‘This guy is really just sitting her, lying to these people. Lying through his teeth, and not caring,’ he said, referencing how Smollett ‘even shed a tear’ during a now widely seen interview with ABC News in which he denied the attack was a hoax.

Calling the actor ‘crazy’ for his continued devotion to the ruse, Amibola admitted that he feels betrayed by Smollett for not embracing his guilt, and taking the fall as he and his brother were forced to do

‘I did feel betrayed by Jussie and what he had done. I didn’t know what to do – I wasn’t ready to say anything. Like, I was mute. And I didn’t want to say anything.’

Considered the state’s star witnesses at the time, the brother’s both delivered in-depth testimonies that laid bare the plot, leading to the actor’s conviction in December 2021.

Smollett, a gay man who alleged his attackers were a pair of MAGA hat-clad white supremacists, has since vehemently denied the charges, even after serving six days of an agree-upon 150 sentence in a Chicago jail. The Illinois Appellate Court ordered a stay on his sentence last March, as he sought an appeal of his conviction.

The brothers recalled how after carrying out the attack they flew to Nigeria – in part to audition for the Nigerian version of Big Brother – and pondered whether they put on a believable performance that Smollett would have approved of.

‘We were the ones that did it,’ Ambiola, 31, says in one clip, seated next to his brother.

‘We was in character the whole time,’ Olabinjo agrees, after being asked by one of the interviewers if the duo had served as ‘believable white supremacists’ – with the obvious elephant in the room being the statuesque brothers’ skin color.

The pair appears to quickly share a glance before Ambiola, feigning surprise as if the inquiry had called his acting chops into question, proudly asserts: ‘100 percent.’

The five-part series featured interviews with Chicago detectives who were called to investigate the case, and how they secretly discerned that despite Smollett’s account of the January 29, 2019, the actor’s supposed assailants had been black.

After just three days of probing the incident, cops began to hone in on the brothers – and subsequently suspected that Smollett’s hate crime claims were, in fact, bogus.

Video evidence from more than 55 sources would prove that narrative to be true, unmasking the brothers as the definite culprits.

At this point, due to conflicting accounts offered by Smollett, cops knew the incident was a hoax – but were then faced with the task with forcing it from the brothers’ mouths themselves.

Cops quickly encountered a road block after learning the pair were out of the country, but would only have to wait a few weeks before they would return.

Olabinjo said: ‘Flying back from Nigeria, we were expecting our other $500 dollar check. I felt like I was just going to get back to business – go back to doing audition, continue working out and living my great life.’

Ambiola, meanwhile, better known by his nickname Bola, says he had a seeking suspicion that lawmen may have been hot on his and his brother’s trail.

‘I felt like, the police was waiting for me,’ the other brother admitted. ‘That’s what I felt like. They’re releasing all these little bits of evidence, but they knew it was off. They just waiting for us to come back.’

It was Ambiola’s intuition that would prove correct, the brothers reveal, with the pair pulled aside by a customs agent after offering up their passports.

‘When I was getting off the plane, the customs agent was checking everyone’s passport, and when they got to me, they pulled me aside,’ Ambiola recalls.

‘Two big-a** police officers came up – I was like damn, it’s over with. They got me.’

The siblings were held in a Cook County detention cell for 47 hours before they cracked and owned up to taking part in Smollett’s strange plot for the first time – which they said the actor designed with the ultimate goal of being viewed as a hero for not only the LGBTQ community, but to black people as well.

‘The police did ask us what Jussie’s motive was, but Jussie did not really tell me a motive,’ says Ambiola of the actor’s aspirations with the ill-advised strategy.

‘[But] from what he was speaking about, or talking about, I would say what he wanted to accomplish was to increase his star level. he wanted to be…

His brother would then interject: ‘He wanted to be the poster child for activism.’

‘That’s what I wanted to say,’ Ambiola replied. ‘He wanted to be the hero for gay people, for black people.

The duo went on to detail the extent of their relationship with Smollett and how the trio became fast-friends through a mutual friend, and the favors the men exchanged for one another.

‘I met him through a friend,’ Ambiola, the more talkative of the two brothers told interviewers. ‘My friend said, “this dude is cool. He’s like everybody else.”’

Amibola recalled how at the time, he felt this assessment to be true, describing how the trio would frequent bars while Smollett was filming in Chicago, and how the actor-director even helped them get parts in the hit drama series.

He also described how Smollet and his brother would regularly smoke marijuana, a substance he was regularly tasked with obtaining for the actor due to his desire to maintain a ‘low profile.’

‘He seemed genuine and authentic as a person,’ said Amibola. ‘We would go out to night clubs or a bar, and just chill, relax – there was a few times that I came to his house and watched TV while they [Smollet and his brother] would be smoking, cause I didn’t really smoke.’

Referencing claims from Jussie’s attorneys that suggested the actor had been in a sexual relationship with him and that the pair ‘masturbated in bathhouses’ – Amibola joked: ‘We would go to nightclubs, the infamous bath houses, and that was about it.’

The aspiring actor went on to speak on the dynamic of the trio’s relationship, and some of the benefits he enjoyed after finding himself in Smollett’s inner circle.

‘He was a lead actor on Empire, which means, being friends with him could you out, which did help me out,’ Amibola said. ‘He helped me get a stand-in role on Empire, and when he directed, he put me in certain positions while I was a feature background artist – so that was beneficial.’

‘On-set,’ he added of Smollett, ‘he was very personable – he seemed easily approachable.’

When asked if either he or his brothers had been asked to do favors for Smollett before, Amibola said that the actor, if he did ask him for anything, ‘would be to help him procure or get weed, and different types of paraphernalia.’

‘He would ask me to do it because he’s not from Chicago, and he wanted to keep a lower profile,’ Amibola said. ‘He did not want to get the drug dealer’s number – he wanted me to be the middleman and to get the drugs for him.

Those were the type of favors he asked me for, but we weren’t thinking “let’s see what we can get from him.” Because I’m not that type of person.’

He went on to describe what he described as a ‘genuine’ relationship with the actor, one that he did not wish to spoil with materialistic and career-driven requests.

‘My relationship with Jussie was very genuine, so I wasn’t thinking about what he could do for me. And I know for a fact if I were to approach him like that, that it would probably go sour – our relationship.

‘So I knew that’s not the route I should take, and that’s not the way I felt anyway.’

The pair then detailed their differing responses when Smollett approached them to stage the crime – with both men ultimately deciding, for different reasons, to help their then-friend.

‘I was down to do it, cause if he we could do this for him, he could probably help us out with our careers,’ said Olabinjo, whose decision was more rooted in a desire to fast-track his acting aspiration.

He admitted: ‘So I was a bit ambitious. I really didn’t think it was going to be anything to big that was gonna cause problems for anybody – nobody was getting hurt or anything – I didn’t see the problem with it.’

His brother, meanwhile, said he was driven more so by sentiment, describing how he felt that he owed the actor for constantly treating him and his brother to nights on the town, and helping him garner acting gigs on such a high-profile show.

The relationship between the brothers and Jussie was a center point of the actor’s trial, which concluded that Smollett had indeed tasked the brothers with carrying out the crime. He was sentenced to 150 days in jail last year.

The Osundairo brothers, meanwhile, were able to walk away from the incident with just two years’ probation and a small fine, after cooperating with police and unmasking the ruse.

The new series by Fox Nation features exclusive interviews with both brothers, as well as several other key figures who played a part in unearthing the scam.

*Courtesy: dailymail.co.uk