The police reckon Jussie Smollett made it all up. They say the black, gay, openly 36-year-old actor orchestrated an assault on his person – specifically, that he paid two Nigerian men to attack him in a Chicago street at two in the morning, to shout racist and homophobic insults and even douse him in bleach and hang a noose around his neck. The cops say he pretended to be the victim of a random assault, all the while paying off his chums with $3,500 – and he would’ve got away with it had it not been a very stupid idea. The cops swooped; Jussie is out on bail. He denies everything. The interesting question, if he did it, is why? One easy answer is that Jussie wanted to be Jesus. It’s often said that the cult of the victim is a modern phenomenon, but it’s not: our civilisation’s greatest hero is a man on a cross. Jussie presented himself as a martyr. He said he’d been targeted because he dared speak out against Donald Trump, and like some latter-day missionary among the pagans, came a cropper because he wasn’t just different, he was vocal about it. This saint-like persecution is endured by genuine victims and claimed by the bogus, including rich, white men like Donald Trump who insist they’re the ones getting the roughest deal nowadays (they’re really not). So I’m not surprised that someone might pretend to have been assaulted, if that’s what happened. Fakers gonna fake, and, in a way, it’s a testament to our generosity as a society that so many people’s instinct is to take the accusation seriously. If someone told you they’d been beaten up and had bleach poured over them, it would be most unchristian to reply: “Prove it.” But we do have to exercise caution and common sense, a deference to due process – and the lack of any of these is what I found most distressing about this case. Liberal politicians and stars initially embraced Jussie’s story with excitement, showing no discrimination in the moral, healthy sense of the word: sniffing out bunkum or maintaining perspective. Ellen Page, an actress, connected the assault to vice president Mike Pence, implying that – like Brexit – the Republican capture of the White House unleashed a tidal wave of bigotry. “Join the dots,” she said. “If you are in a position of power, and you hate people, and you want to cause suffering to them, you go through the trouble, you spend your career trying to cause suffering, what do you think is going to happen?” That’s not an unreasonable observation; what’s said at the top matters. But it also matters that in this instance the violent consequence of Trump’s prejudice might have been a huge con, a con that wiser birds laughed off as obviously staged. The noose, the bleach – it was as though Smollett had misappropriated an entire history of suffering for a crime plot so perfect the police instantly detected fraud, but was so fictional that Hollywood, being Hollywood, assumed it was real. Cynics suspected all along that Smollett’s crucifixion was a performance; they also suspected his supporters were performing too, rending their garments like the hired mourners that pop up in the Bible. The holy narrative of persecution was being affirmed, and I’d be willing to bet that if Smollett is found guilty he will write himself a second series of confected victimhood, explaining why the intersectional nightmare of being a soap star in Trump’s America left him with no choice. “It wasn’t my fault!” No, it never is.