“Empire” star Jussie Smollett, is now out on bond just weeks after he reported an alleged assault and claiming it was a hate crime.

The Chicago Police Department investigated and found out that the actor actually orchestrated the assault himself.

Smollett’s story started to fall apart when he did an interview on ABC news, during which his mannerisms seemed off and his words came out sounding like lines he’d rehearsed for his next scene.

His attitude even seemed to flare up when interviewers brought up accusations about the assault being made up.

Something else that stood out was that when asked about his refusal to release his phone to authorities, he claimed he didn’t because of private pictures, videos, numbers, etc. contained within the device.

Smollett acknowledges that hate crimes are a serious on going issue in America, and is very passionate about speaking against them especially because he has experienced them first hand as an openly gay, black man.

However, Smollett shouldn’t have staged such a racially charged and homophobic hate crime to raise awareness as that can actually do more harm than good.

Stages crimes like this will give people a reason to dismiss future claims of similar crimes because they’ll be able to say, “Well what if it’s fake?”

Smollett himself doesn’t have to have racial slurs hurled at him, a noose used on him, or bleached poured on him to show that these things can happen.

He could have just as easily have brought attention to these types of crimes by speaking up about actual victims instead.

Furthermore, he decided to stage this assault during black history month.

We could give him the benefit of the doubt this his intention could have been to shed light on the fact that black people have been the most frequent victims too hate crimes.

However, as stated before, there could have been better ways of going about bringing awareness to these issues.

It is important for people to realize incidents like this can and really do happen, but a lot of people who experience the hate crimes do not report it.

It is imperative to speak out and let it be known that bias motivated incidents and crimes will not be tolerated and always need to be reported to police enforcement.

You don’t have to pull a Jussie Smollett to raise awareness, but change does start with you.

Speak up. Don’t let these crimes go unpunished.