About 10 years ago in Boston, Charles Stuart shot his pregnant wife in their car after a Lamaze (sp) class. He phoned the police from the car & blamed it on a black man robbing them. The phone calls were broadcasted on the media & the Boston Police hit the black neighborhoods pretty hard looking for suspects eventually arresting a man named Willie Bennett. (I Think)
The whole thing started to unravel on Charles a couple weeks later & as the Boston Police were about to arrest him he committed suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge.
Boston has had its share of bad racial incidents & this was pretty bad.
As I recall, Stuart’s parents, a very well to do couple, were mortified by the incident. They set up a college scholorship for kids from the neighborhood.
The Carol DiMaiti Stuart Foundation was created by *her * middle-class parents, in sympathy for the Roxbury community that had also suffered from Charles Stuart’s crime. It is still very much in operation, providing college scholarship funds for young minority students.
I live in Atlanta, which tends to be a hotbed for these kinds of racial arguments. A few years back, Ralph Abernathy Jr. was arrested at the airport after security found pot in his boxers. He admitted to it, they had video of the search, they had the pot. However, the local black “leaders” raised a ruckus about how he was being unjustly prosecuted. Otherwise smart people were defending this kid’s right to have pot in his pants and not be punished. And guess who was right in the middle of the show? Al Sharpton. :smack:
If she’s as… um… tetched as the various reports suggest, then it’s quite possible that, after all this time, she has actually come to believe the (obviously false) story she’s been telling and re-telling. Memory is a strange and funny thing.
Some differences between the Brawley case and the others cited above:
The Brawley affair was an extremely drawn-out one, taking close to a year to be (sort of) resolved when a grand jury found it to have been a hoax. It was eleven years before another jury awarded damages to a falsely accused district attorney.
By contrast, the Susan Smith and Charles Stuart cases were resolved within a couple of weeks or less.
All three cases featured individuals making false claims about attackers from another racial group, as a means of obscuring wrongful or criminal behavior. The Brawley case, however, beyond specifically smearing the innocent, developed into a sweeping indictment by Brawley’s advisers of the entire N.Y. State criminal justice system, for reasons that seem to have included the personal and political aggrandizement of those making the charges. From this site:
“…then-assistant district attorney Steven Pagones…was named as one of the attackers by Miss Brawley’s advisers: (Alton) Maddox (Jr.), the Rev. Al Sharpton and lawyer C. Vernon Mason. While Miss Brawley refused to speak with authorities or the media, her advisers were soon making wild claims. Jury selection was supposed to have started for the Pagones’ defamation lawsuit, seeking more than $150 million from Miss Brawley’s three advisers when Maddox accused then-state Attorney General Robert Abrams of masturbating over photos of Miss Brawley. Sharpton compared Abrams, a Jew, to Adolf Hitler. All three linked then-Gov. Mario Cuomo to organized crime and the Ku Klux Klan.”
And lastly, while the principals involved in the Smith and Stuart cases recanted or otherwise made their guilt known relatively quickly, Tawana Brawley’s advisers (i.e. Sharpton and Maddox) have never to my knowledge admitted that the case was a hoax. Partly for this reason there are still people who believe her story, and the affair remains an open wound.
A key difference between the Susan Smith and Charles Stuart cases, of course, is in the impact of the false claims. The Boston police bought Stuart’s story wholesale, at least at first, and went on a witch hunt to find the noneixstent assailant.
Conversely, the Union police smelled a rat almost immediately and had the FBI give her (and her husband) a lie detector test the next day, which (depending on what source you believe) she either flunked badly or flunked slightly. Even the forensic artist who sketched Smith’s “assailant” didn’t buy her story. Both the local police and FBI thus became convinced she was lying; the FBI began a series of carefully planned interrogations. Even their press briefings were scripted to put pressure on Smith to confess. Unlike the Stuart case there was never a serious attempt to find a black assailant; the local cops and FBI knew almost from the beginning that the assailant was a work of fiction. The charade ended on November 3 when she confessed to the local sheriff (who of course was playing his own part on the FBI’s plans.)
It’s often misunderstood that the police believed for over a week that the Smith children were actually kidnapped by a black man, but it’s not true; the cops were on Susan Smith pretty much from the get-go and their investigation of the black assailant angle was perfunctory at most.
I read the Court TV article a while back. If I remember correctly, Tawana herself never actually made any allegations to the police. Rather, she supposedly told her mother and/or other relatives who then relayed the information to the authorities. What little information Tawana gave directly to the authorities was merely in the form of “yes” or “no” answers to direct questions e.g “Did such and such happen?”
I followed this case when it happened, and later got to meet Rev. & Mrs. Sharpton through work.
The main problem with Tawana Brawley’s story was the complete and utter lack of ANY physical evidence to back her story. She had been held and raped in the woods for six days, but had no plant material, semen, or foreign hairs on her body. Her body was smeared with dogshit, but there was none on her face and there were cotton wads in her nose and ears. She claimed her hair was hacked off, but it turned out she had short hair and a weave.
Rev. Al said that sitting down with DA Robert Abrams would be like asking “the Jews to sit down with Mista Hitler.” A horrible comment, as Abrams is a devout Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust. He later admitted it was a bad statement, and then accused Abrams of “masturbating to Tawana Brawley’s photograph.”
There is still a warrant out for Tawana’s mother in Duchess County.
Wait-how does hiding in a church make you immune to answering a supeona?
(My knowledge of this case and all that largely comes from the Law & Order episode based on it, which I’m not going to take as a good source).
Regarding Susan Smith, her testimony to police sent off alarm bells in the first couple of days. She alleged that the kidnapper had jumped into her car while she sat at a red light, but that no other cars were around. The intersection she specified had a stoplight that was equipped with a triggering system. In other words, if there were no other cars around, the very act of approaching the intersection would have caused the light to turn green. The police picked up on this right away.
It doesn’t. But sending in the police to forcibly arrest her was exactly what Sharpton, et al, wanted.
“Those white monsters violated this sacred temple and dragged an innocent, God-fearing woman away. All she wanted was to protect the good name of her poor daughter, so horribly defiled by a white man with a badge, and they didn’t even have the human decency to leave her alone in her time of trial!”
That wasn’t the only factor. A big one was that there had been (although I cannot document it) several cases where carjackers took over a vehicle, drove a block, and realised there was a baby in the back seat. They quickly abandoned the vehicle, sometimes only half a block away.
The reasoning was simple: carjacking would not make you the subject of an intense manhunt for kidnapping, or possibly murder. I think there were almost no cases of carjackers suddenly deciding to become babynappers.
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).
Completely wrong, and pathetic to boot. There simply isn’t a more severe false accusation than the false accusation of murder. The makers of these false allegations were not just liars, they were also murderers of their own family members. That they sought to blame these crimes on black men, and that a huge chunk of the white public bought into this gambit, is sad but not surprising.
I saw the program that Phil Donahue did from inside the church during the Brawley case. When someone asked why there was no semen found inside Tawana, the responses were:
Mason: There was. NOT
Sharpton: Tawana was delibertately given a bath before they took the test to eliminate all semen. NOT
Mason: Well, what color where the people who gave the test?
Sharpton also said “The fact that every black person here today has a different color complexion proves that the white man’s rape of black woman is a reality.” Uh, what do all the different shades of white people prove?
They also stated that “Nine out of ten times, when a black woman says she was raped by a white man, it’s true.” Someone then asked the obvious question: What if this is the tenth time?
Completely wrong, and pathetic to boot. There simply isn’t a more severe false accusation than the false accusation of murder. The makers of these false allegations were not just liars, they were also murderers of their own family members. That they sought to blame these crimes on black men, and that a huge chunk of the white public bought into this gambit, is sad but not surprising.
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Apparently you missed all the posts raised in my previous post. You are invited to read it again.
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).
Think about it for a moment.
What’s the racially explosive accusation:
A black man murders a pregnant white woman in the act of robbery.
A cabal of whites (including local law enforcement officials) rapes and degrades a young black woman, smears her with feces and tosses her into a trash bag like garbage. The state’s top leaders not only cover up the crime, they are sexually excited by it.