Jussie Smollett Returns To TV On Special Forces Competition

Actor Jussie Smollett is returning to television in a new reality competition show. Smollett was a co-star on the Fox series “Empire” until about six years ago when he was accused of staging a hate crime attack against him. Now Smollett will be one of the celebrity contestants on the new Fox competition show “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.” The show features 18 celebrities participating in an Army boot camp-style athletic competition.

Other notable contestants joining Smollett include Kody Brown, Brittany Cartwright, Teresa Giudice, and Gia Giudice. The show will take place in Morocco, where contestants will face extreme circumstances, including urban warfare scenarios. Fox has stated that the show will be a test of physical, mental, and emotional resilience, with no eliminations, just survival

Smollett starred on Fox’s music-industry drama Empire for five seasons from 2015-19. In January 2019, he claimed he had been attacked in Chicago, by two Black men who shouted homophobic slurs. The two men then said Smollett paid them to stage the attack, and Smollett was charged with filing a false police report; the charges were later dropped after Smollett paid a fine and did community service. His character was scripted out of Empire’s final season.

Then in 2020, he was re-indicted by a special prosecutor and convicted of five counts of felony disorderly conduct related to filing false reports in 2021. He served six days in jail before being released; the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2024, ruling that the second set of charges violated Smollett’s due process rights.

Smollett has maintained throughout the case that he did not stage the crime. He recently participated in a Netflix documentary titled The Truth About Jussie Smollett? that’s set to premiere Aug. 22 on the streamer.

It’s set to air on September 25th.