“Tawana Glenda Brawley (born 1972) is an African-American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York who gained notoriety in 1987-88 for falsely accusing six white men of having raped her. The charges received widespread national attention because of her age (15), the persons accused (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney), and the shocking state in which Brawley was “found” after the rape (naked and covered with feces)”
She is in the news because the prosecuting attorney is finally collecting on a slander judgment against her. She now owes a total of about $431,492 for statements she made when she was 15 years old.
Is this a special rule for Ms. Brawley, or are you asserting a more general principle that no minor should be able to be sued for anything, or something in between?
I was briefly a suspect. But I don’t hold any personal animosity to Tawana Bradley. She was a kid in a fucked-up situation and it quickly pulled her in over her head.
I blame the scumbags like Maddox, Mason, and Sharpton who jumped in and pushed this case for their own self-aggrandizement.
She’s an adult now. All she has to do is apologize and recant and Pagonas will forgive the debt. The fact that she refuses to do so makes her continually culpable, regardless of the shitty situation of her childhood.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, and Sharpton and Maddox are and always have been gigantic scumbags.
I’m interested in hearing your story about being a suspect.
A more general principle, and something in between. I have intimate details of this case and it’s clear the girl was a pawn. I also question the slander conviction since I think the prosecutor was a public figure.
If her lies were confined to when she was still a minor, you might have some point. But since she has continued to refuse to tell the truth as an adult, that makes her culpable as an adult.
Given that her lies began and maintained the entire charade, she can hardly be considered a minor figure, even if others used her for their own purposes.
I was living in New York at the time of the case, and I can’t forgive her for what she and her allies put everybody through.
I can’t tell if you’re saying the defamation should not have been found under existing law, or indicating your belief that the law of defamation needs to change.
The current law is that a public figure can be defamed but the plaintiff must allege, and prove, actual malice. Actual malice is shown when the speaker knows that the defamatory information is false, or publishes the defamatory statements with reckless disregard for whether they are false or not. In this case, Brawley knew the statements were false, so the current state of the law fully supports a finding of liability for her.
Turning to the question of Brawley’s liability as a minor, it’s been quite a few years since I studied this, and I have no idea about any special rules New York has, but as a general statement of the law, I recall that minors are liable for their own tortious conduct with some caveats. A child under the age of seven could not be negligent. A child between the ages of seven and fourteen was presumed not to be negligent, but that presumption could be overcome with evidence. And a child over the age of fourteen was presumed capable of negligence, but that presumption could be overcome.
If that’s the law in New York, then I can’t really see what might convince me that Brawley did not know, at the time, that what she was doing was wrong and that she appreciated the difference between acting properly and acting wrongly. IN other words, she knew then that it was reckless and wrong to accuse people of attacking her when that attack never happened.
This post is getting dangerously close to the line where opinions end and trolling-like statements begin. Back up from that line now, you won’t be noted again about this.