Jurors heard closing arguments in the case and spent about two and a half hours deliberating before being sent home for the day.

“Facts matter. Truth matters. Evidence still matters,” prosecutor Sam Mendenhall told the panel in his summation. “Follow the evidence where it leads.”

Smollett’s lawyer Nenye Uche said in his closing remarks that the prosecution’s case against his client was “built like a house of cards”.

“And we all know what happens to a house of cards when you apply a little pressure,” Uche said, telling jurors to be “constitutional warriors” when they deliberate.

Smollett, 39, who is Black and openly gay, faces six felony counts of disorderly conduct in Cook County Circuit Court over accusations he made false reports to the police.

He has denied faking the attack and pleaded not guilty in February last year. He took the stand this week and told the jury “there was no hoax”.

The case became a touchstone in the culture wars inflamed during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Celebrities and others rushed to support Smollett when he first made the accusations in early 2019 that he was the victim of a hate crime and that his attackers had shouted, “This is MAGA country” – a reference to Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”.

Smollett told police he had been accosted on a darkened street by two masked strangers in January 2019. According to his account, his assailants threw a noose around his neck and poured chemicals on him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs and expressions of support for Trump.

A month later, police arrested Smollett, accusing him of paying two brothers US$3,500 to stage the attack in a hoax aimed at gaining public sympathy and raising his show-business profile.

During his testimony on Monday, Smollett contradicted the testimony of two brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, who told the court last week that Smollett paid them to stage a phoney attack.

Smollett’s acting career has faded since the incident. He lost his role on “Empire”, a Fox television hip-hop drama that ended a five-year run last year.