A Hollywood leading man who cut his teeth playing a doctor is switching professions in one of the most watched trials in recent history, offering an assist in the case against Derek Chauvin.
During an appearance on talk show "The View," George Floyd's family lawyer Benjamin Crump said George Clooney reached out to him this week as Chauvin’s trial played out and proferred some advice.
“He says ‘Attorney Crump, you should tell them if Derek Chauvin feels so confident in that, he should volunteer during his case to get down on the floor in that courtroom, and let somebody come and put their knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds and be able to see if he can survive,’” Crump recalled of Clooney’s email.
“The experts will opine during this case that the average human being can go without oxygen from 30 seconds to 90 seconds — where George Floyd went without oxygen for over 429 seconds, and that’s why it was intentional what this officer did,” Crump added.
“I believe in my heart...that he will be held criminally liable and it will hopefully set new precedents in America,” he recounted Clooney writing.
A rep for the actor confirmed to Entertainment Tonight that he had, in fact sent the email. In real life, Clooney is married to a human rights lawyer but has no known legal training.
So, is Crump taking his advice to heart? He didn't say.
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But we do know Clooney is bullish on civil rights and the rights of people to protest on behalf of victims of police violence.
"How many times have we seen people of color killed by police?" Clooney earlier wrote in an essay in Daily Beast. "Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald. There is little doubt that George Floyd was murdered. We watched as he took his last breath at the hands of four police officers. Now we see another defiant reaction to the systemic cruel treatment of a portion of our citizens like we saw in 1968, 1992, and 2014."
"The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we've grown as a country from our original sin of slavery," he also wrote. "The fact that we aren't actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor. We need systemic change in our law enforcement and in our criminal justice system. ... This is our pandemic. It infects all of us, and in 400 years we've yet to find a vaccine."