Jussie Smollett Finally Facing Possible Firing From ‘Empire’

“Empire” creator Lee Daniels dropped a bombshell on Wednesday morning when he admitted that disgraced actor Jussie Smollett may not be returning to the series after all.

Daily Mail reported that Daniels begrudgingly revealed this during an interview with “Good Morning America” to promote a new play that he is producing. It did not take long for Smollett’s name to come up, and Daniels tried to dodge questions about him at first.

“It’s so painful that our souls are cracked,” Daniels said. “It’s just too painful to talk about.”

After some digging by the interviewer, Daniels finally confessed that Smollett might not be coming back to the show after all when he was asked whether the city of Chicago’s civil suit against the actor was affecting the television show at all.

“It’s causing a dilemma,” Daniels said. “And we are in discussions about that right now.”

Daniels would not say whether or not he believed Smollett was innocent or guilty of staging the hate crime against himself, saying “I cannot judge. I can only have compassion.” However, Daniels did add, “If he is guilty than I am worried about his mental health.”

This clearly means that Smollett’s future on “Empire” is being decided right at this very moment. While Daniels and the stars of the show had initially indicated at first that they wanted to keep him on the show, they may have realized just what a huge liability and distraction he has become to them.

Frankly, this has been a long time coming, as Smollett should have been fired from “Empire” months ago. Should he have been a conservative actor accused of staging a hate crime committed against himself by a liberal, he would have been fired within hours of the accusations coming out. Lest we forget that Roseanne Barr was fired from her job in Hollywood just hours after she posted an offensive tweet about a former advisor to Barack Obama. Barr was not even accused of committing a crime as Smollett was, yet she was out the door within hours because of her conservative views while he has been given the benefit of the doubt by Hollywood for months.

While it certainly is good news that Smollett is in danger of being fired, we should not count our chickens before they hatch on this one. Just as Hollywood will do anything to blacklist a conservative, they will do whatever it takes to protect one of their own liberals. That’s why even after all of this, you should not be surprised to see Smollet on the next season of “Empire” after all.