Empire star Jussie Smollett is returning to Fox for a new reality show, over six years after he was accused of staging a hate crime, per The Hollywood Reporter. Smollett will join the cast of Fox’s reality show Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, where celebrities push themselves to complete challenges based on military training. This upcoming season, Smollett will be one of 18 celebrities to participate. The actor rose to fame for his role as Jamal Lyon on Empire, which he starred in from 2015 to 2019. Smollett, who is gay, was written off the series after he appeared to have staged a hate crime against himself in 2019. After he claimed to have suffered a racist and homophobic attack by two men who poured a chemical on him and put a noose around his neck, police alleged that the men in question were paid by Smollett to carry out the acts in an effort to gain him more notoriety and higher pay on the series. Smollett was charged with filing a false report and five felony counts of disorderly conduct, all of which were ultimately overturned. Special Forces will be his first official return to television since the controversy. A documentary called The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, coming to Netflix in August, promises “new evidence” about Smollett’s incident, and bills itself as the “shocking true story of an allegedly fake story that some now say might just be a true story.”
Read it at The Hollywood Reporter
