I was reading something earlier, and Tawana Brawley was mentioned. Now, I’ve never really read much about it before, but a google search brought up several sites-the most technical and factual appears to be one from Court TV (I confess to not knowing much about the credibility of CTV, but the article looked decent, with very little opinions stated, sticking mostly to the facts.
The facts appear to be:
Ms Brawley was found in the woods, covered in feces, in tattered and torn clothing, with her hair hacked off, racial slurrs written on her body. She claimed to have been abducted and raped by six white police officers and held for four days.
Forensic evidence put her allegations in doubt. Her cause was later taken up by, among others, Rev. Al Sharpton, a rather controversial figure, to put it mildly.
Today, Tawana Brawley still insists she was raped, and there have been charges of a cover up.
Who to believe? What’s the “straight dope?”
(I hope Great Debates is okay for this question. I was going to put it in General Questions, but then I figured that this subject is a rather controversial one, and it might be easier to determine the facts if I put it here).
Conventional wisdom suggests that whatever she was doing, it wasn’t being raped by six police officers. I don’t have any better information than the CTV site, but it seems more than accurate.
The case is mostly notable for the stink and hue raised by a Reverend Al Sharpton.
I think this case was put to bed years ago as utter made up bullshit, and not even good bullshit. It was an obvious tissue of outrageous lies from the beginning.
I live near where it all happened. She wasn’t found in the woods, she was found in a plastic trash bag behind a building in the apartment projects where she lived.
For me, this blew the whole case right from the start:
An eyewitness, a completely credible woman with absolutely no reason to lie who lived in the same development, watched from her window as Brawley walked behind the building, climbed into the trash bag, and lied down and waited to be discovered. She testified as such.
Brawley was a troubled teen girl who stayed out all weekend and didn’t want to get smacked around by her step-father for it. So she made up this ridiculous story and Sharpton, Mason & Maddox ran with it.
One of the assistant DAs whom Sharpton accused of covering things up sued Sharpton for libel and won. Sharpton wound up paying him a hundred grand or so I think.
To this day Brawley maintains her story. But she’s, how shall I put this, not a very bright person. She was easily convinced that she was going to be some kind of modern day Martin Luther King or something.
All in all, political correctness gone absolutely amuck.
Political correctness nothing – this was someone who screwed up (Tawana was out late, IIRC, and feared getting in trouble with her mom), and decided to cover it up with a lie that would play to people’s worst expectations.
It’s similar to the Susan Smith case (woman drowns her two boys in a car, then lies about being carjacked by a black man), albeit on a smaller scale.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 would be the maximum in injustice, abuse of racial politics and dragging innocent people through the mud, the Brawley case would be a 10. The Susan Smith case would draw about a 2 (the Charles Stuart affair in Boston might get a 7).
It was worse than that. He named one of the county officials as one of the “rapists.” He sued Sharpton (along with his advisors C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox) for defamation and won. Sharpton paid out verrrrrrry slowly, and in the end, some friends ended up paying the judgement for him.
Don’t have the title on the tip of my tongue any more, but I read a book that pretty much nails Sharpton and Co. to the wall as being well aware, very early on, that this incident had not happened, and that they decided to proceed with the circus anyhow.
I was at SUNY/Old Westbury and editor of the school newspaper at the time, and my best reporter who had some extended family in the Wappinger Falls area wrote a story and an editorial excoriating the continued presence of disgusting white racism, only to pull both pieces (before publication) the next day. She said word had filtered back from family and neighbors that something wasn’t quite right about this. By the end of the week, the media was getting publicly skeptical.
Not to hijack this thread on a wholly subjective topic, but I’d rate the Susan Smith fiasco a bit worse, if only because we ended up with two dead boys in the process. I also find it a bit telling that her imaginary carjacker was a black man, as if an imaginary white carjacker was less plausible…
Freddie’s Fashon Mart was a white Jewish owned business in Harlem. After their rent was raised, they raised the rent on their subtenant, a black owned record store. Sharpton led protests and pickets against the Fashon Mart, claiming that they were outsiders who were trying to force the record store out so that a white business would move. As the protests went on, picketers clashed with store customers, and the whole business ended when somebody went into the store one night with a gun and a flammable liquid, started shooting, then torched the place and either killed himself or was killed by police. Here’s a link to the NYT article reporting the story.
Was there ever any investigation of her family situation-that she was abused? I can’t imagine being so afraid of getting in trouble that I’d actually smear myself with dog shit, hack off my hair and burn my clothes and sleep in a plastic bag in the trash!
For awhile she dodged a subpoena by staying in a church someplace. I read an interview with her while she was staying there and, my god, it was like something out of an Amos & Andy sketch.
She went on about how, “I’s be treated like a queen here. I don’ts got to go out for nothin’, everything is brought to me.” She had no regard for anything she or her daughter were doing. She thought she was a celebrity now…
