Osundairo, a professional boxer, made the revelation in a recent interview with media personality Chude Jideonwo.
A US-based Nigerian Abimbola Osundairo has accused Jussie Smollett, a popular American actor, of betraying him and others who helped him fake the controversial racist attack that got the celebrity into trouble in 2019.
Osundairo, a professional boxer, made the revelation in a recent interview with media personality Chude Jideonwo.
He alleged that Smollett groomed him before requesting him and his brother, Ola Osundairo, to assault him.
SaharaReporters had reported how the incident led to Smollett being convicted of faking a racist and homophobic hate crime and faced up to 20 years in jail for staging the attack and concocting a story, purposely to gain limelight.
Reports earlier in February said Smollett asked the Illinois Supreme Court to review a ruling that upheld his Cook County conviction for lying about an alleged hate crime.
Osundairo further said that the actor allegedly tried to persuade him to accept the services of a male masseuse, a proposition that he declined due to his suspicions.
"He told us the Kim Kardashian abduction was fake, too,” Osundairo said.
He continued: “He was my friend, and he confided in me. He asked me to beat him up, randomly. I thought he was high because he was smoking weed. Although, he mentioned to me that weeks prior to this, he got a hate letter. That had led him to concoct this situation. I don’t know if he sent himself the letter though because right now, I don’t know what to think. We were supposed to rehearse.
“We went to the place where the attack was supposed to happen. He showed us the exact location and said, ‘Hey, I want you guys to do it here.’ The reason he said we should do it at that location was because he saw a camera. He thought the camera was facing us, so it would catch the attack. Lo and behold, the camera was not facing us, it was facing an entirely different direction. So, we did rehearse in that sense.”
Osundairo detailed how Smollett allegedly planned the entire incident, even suggesting they portrayed themselves as "white supremacists" for the attack.
Osundairo also said he couldn’t believe the motive of his friend barely five years ago.
He said, "It's hard to believe someone like him would do something like that. You're at the forefront, you're the face of the black gay activist movement.
"It fell apart when he got too greedy. It was supposed to be for social media. He’d give it to the blogs, or the blogs would pick it up, and that would be it. But the vital mistake he made, which made it criminal and all of us got in trouble, was that he called the police. You weren’t supposed to call the police. That’s what made it a crime — calling the police and giving them a false testimony.
"That's crazy, He got to be low down and dirty to do that. We were helping him out and he was going to just willingly throw us under the bus like that?"