Jussie Smollett Dodges Karamo Brown Dating Rumors After Viral Kiss

Jussie Smollett kept quiet about his rumored connection to Queer Eye personality Karamo Brown when he was seen out for lunch with a friend in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Smollett — whose conviction for lying to police over an alleged staged hate crime was thrown out by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2024 — was photographed speaking with a male companion outside an LA restaurant before returning to his SUV and driving off.

Footage from the outing showed the 44-year-old former Empire actor being asked where things stand with Brown, 45, after the pair were seen sharing an affectionate kiss at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday.

‘It’s all love,’ Smollett said, offering a brief and ambiguous response before shutting the vehicle door.

The Daily Mail has contacted Smollett’s representatives for comment, though no response has been received so far.

For the lunch outing, Smollett opted for a relaxed, athletic look, wearing a vivid yellow T-shirt that showed off his toned frame.

The TV star wore a set of beige Adidas trainers and carried a small black jacket and bag while wearing sleek aviator sunglasses.

Smollett appeared to take his relationship with Brown public the day before, when they were pictured outside the transportation hub at LAX as they embraced and locked lips. 

A day earlier, they were photographed together during a loved-up day of running errands in LA, during which Smollett affectionately stroked the Queer Eye star’s chin. 

The new couple grabbed lunch with Brown’s mother Charmaine – seemingly an indicator of their strong feelings for one another – before running errands and embarking on a hike through Runyon Canyon. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to Brown’s representative for comment but hasn’t received a response.

The alleged relationship appears to be fairly fresh, as Smollett and his fiancé Jabari Redd reportedly split recently.

The couple had been dating since 2022 – three years after Smollett sparked major backlash for falsely reporting a hate crime that he staged against himself – but they didn’t announce their engagement until June 2025.

Earlier this month, TMZ reported that Jussie had called off the engagement a few weeks earlier. 

Brown appears to see his alleged relationship with Smollett going the distance and potentially leading to marriage.

In an interview with Reality with The King, Brown said he was ‘100-percent sure’ that his boyfriend was the one as he gushed profusely about his new partner.

At the time, Brown did not reveal the identity of his lover, saying they were waiting to go public to protect their relationship.

‘I’ve met my equal. It’s powerful when you meet someone who you feel 100-percent safe with, you feel 100-percent secure with, who you can just trust with your heart because you know they are just a great human being and they get everything.

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‘It’s special. It’s pretty amazing,’ he said.

‘We are deep in love, but [that’s] why we are not public yet because we don’t want comments,’ he said.

‘We are protecting the love we have because I do believe this is going to be my husband.

‘I believe this is going to be my forever person. I feel it every single day. You know we don’t have any arguments. Everything is just easy,’ Brown explained. ‘And not saying that we don’t have discussions, but everything is just easy. We just get each other. It’s constant laughter. It’s constant love. It’s just constant everything.’

Smollett’s newest romance comes seven years after he was found with a noose around his neck and claimed he was attacked by two men shouting ‘racial and homophobic slurs’ and who ‘poured an unknown chemical substance on him’.

A police investigation found that his story did not add up and, at the end of 2021, he was convicted of five charges over his false reports of being attacked.

But three years later, Smollett’s conviction was overturned in a shocking decision.

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the actor’s Fifth Amendment rights had been violated when he accepted a plea deal under which prosecutors stipulated that he would not be tried again.

Under the deal, Smollett was required to perform 15 hours of community service and to pay a $10,000 fine, in exchange for avoiding jail time and having the case wiped from his record.  

The city of Chicago’s Law Department filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2019 to recover over $130,000 in costs incurred investigating his allegedly staged attack, after he failed to meet a city-imposed payment deadline.

The case, which had dragged on for six years, was finally put to rest by both sides through a settlement.

But the attempt to get Smollett to pay back the police led a special prosecutor to investigate why the charges against him had been dropped, leading him to be hit with six counts of felony disorderly conduct.

The Illinois Supreme Court justices ultimately decided that the decision to charge the TV star again violated the deal he had agreed to and his constitutional rights.

Brown, meanwhile, has endured a difficult year that also made headlines.

His rift with his Queer Eye castmates was unveiled after he abruptly pulled out of two interviews with his costars to promote the new season.

In a statement given to CBS Mornings explaining his absence from a scheduled interview with them, Brown said: ‘Though the show is ending, I hope everyone remembers the main theme I have tried to teach them over the past decade, which is to focus on and to protect their mental health/peace from people or a world who seek to destroy it; which is why I can’t be there today.’

Brown has since said the falling-out was due in part to a conversation his castmates had about him behind his back, which his mother overheard.

‘The thing I know is the tears I saw in my mother’s eyes,’ he told People. ‘[She kept repeating], “I thought they were your friends.” It made me realize I can no longer stay silent about how often I was made to feel like an outsider.’