Jussie Smollett could be a victim — of invasion of privacy.
So says Robert Shapiro, who believes the judge who wants to seize the “Empire” star’s Google data is over-reaching.
“A judge can do whatever a judge wants to do,” the lawyer said when asked about the situation on Friday. “Doesn’t mean it’s gonna be upheld and it doesn’t mean an appellate court will agree with him; but judges have a lot of power.”
Earlier this month, a Cook County judge ordered Google to hand over the actor’s emails, photos, location data and private messages for an entire year, as part of a special prosecutor investigation into whether or not he was subjected to a racist and homophobic attack last January, as he claims.
Smollett claimed he was beaten, had a noose tied around his neck, and had bleach thrown over him by masked assailants. But three weeks later, he was charged by a grand jury with a class 4 felony of falsifying a police report, as investigators claimed he orchestrated the entire thing himself.
Exactly four weeks after that, all charges were dropped, on the agreement he did 16 hours of community service and relinquished his $10k bond.
Now special prosecutors led by Dan Webb want every bit of data from both Jussie’s and his manager’s Google accounts, including draft or deleted emails, any files stored on Google Drive, Google Voice texts, and web search and browsing history.
The search warrant issued to Google also specified that Google should not tell anybody about the search warrant, lest it “jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation”, according to the Chicago Tribune. However the news ultimately leaked anyway.
It is unclear if Google has complied with the order yet.
When asked if the prosecutor’s demands were an invasion of privacy, Shapiro replied: “I think it is… I think it is.”
Of course, Google did not exist when Shapiro and his team won their most famous case, when OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995.
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