The 36-year-old actor, a star of the Fox series Empire, received an outpouring of national attention and sympathy after he was reported to have been violently attacked in Chicago by two white men shouting anti-black and anti-hay epithets. After the police found and interviewed the ostensible attackers, who turned out to be two Nigerian-American brothers, and collected additional evidence, they arrested Smollett, alleging that he concocted the entire thing. – Vulture