In a report issued Wednesday, a judge in Chicago ordered a sweeping search warrant of Google, asking the company to hand over a year worth of data on the Empire actor.
What We Know:
- Smollett was charged with 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct at the top of last year after being accused of hiring two brothers to stage an attack on himself that included nooses and that attackers screaming out racial and homophobic slurs.
- Charges were dropped against Smollett causing him to feel vindicated and the mayor and police superintendent to be furious. Cops in Chicago, where the disgraced actor lives and alleges that the attack occurred, have said that Smollett made the whole thing up.
- On Dec. 6, the judge ordered Google to turn over Smollett’s emails, photos, location, data, and private messages as part of an investigation into the alleged hoax attack, according to the Chicago Tribune.
- The warrants are seeking an outflow of documentation from Smollett and his manager’s Google accounts. Additional documents requested include email drafts, deleted messages, Google Drive files, Google Voice texts, and web browsing history.
- Special Prosecutor Dan Webb is investigating whether Smollett faked his own hate crime- and wasted tens of thousands of dollars of the Chicago Police Departments money in the process. Webb, filed two warrants for all of Smollett’s data between November 2018 and November 2019, presumably looking for any incriminating comments that the actor might have made about the case.
- Google was ordered not to comment on the warrants and has yet to confirm whether they complied.
This whole ordeal hasn’t worked out great for Smollett, who, in addition to being sued by the city of Chicago, he also lost his job as one of the lead characters in FOX’s Empire.
