Hate Hoax History II
The Tawana Brawly & Al Sharpton Hate Crime Hoax
A racist gang-rape of a 15 year old black girl by white men including a cop and a subsequent coverup orchestrated by a conspiracy between the police, the state of New York, the Mafia, the KKK and the Irish Republican Army?!?1
Seeing Al Sharpton on MSNBC today, as if he were some kind of respectable figure, with his blue checkmark on Twitter where he describes himself as a “Baptist Minister & Political, Civil Rights, and Social Justice Activist”, one might never imagine that he called his enemies “punk faggot” or that was made famous by a hate crime hoax that he perpetuated along with the rabidly racist cult leader Louis Farrakhan and others, a hate crime hoax for which he has never apologized and through which he has enriched himself and lifted himself up onto the national stage forevermore. One might never imagine he used to have pretty ladies’ salon hair and was four times the size.
But he did, and he was.
In 1987, it was reported that a 15 year old black girl was abducted and raped by multiple white men over a 4 day period. She had left home for school on November 24 and did not return home. Presumably, her mother and step-father were worried sick. 4 days later, they say, she was found in a trash bag with feces smeared on her and with racial slurs written on her flesh. Some of her hair had been chopped off or at least chopped unevenly. Reportedly, she was unconscious…well, pretending to be. At any rate, she was reportedly unresponsive for some time. She eventually communicated non-verbally and then verbally. According to the N.Y. Times…
After sketching a nightmare of sexual and racial abuse in the hands of about six white men, including one she took to be a police officer, Miss Brawley has refused, at the urging of her lawyers and other advisers, to cooperate further.
The Grand Jury Report states that she claimed to have been…
repeatedly raped in a wooded area by a group of white men, at least one of whom was a "white cop."
She eventually spoke and said she was raped and otherwise abused by 4 men. The N.Y. Times reported in 1988 that…
the case has tormented a community, provoked rallies and protests, befuddled the highest officials of New York State
Witnesses say that on November 24, she did not go to school and that for the next few days, she avoided opportunities to go home or to contact her family who were worried about her, according to the N.Y. Times which stated…
Brawley had run away from home at least once before. Last summer, she said, the girl stayed away from home a couple of days…Now, she apparently wanted to stay away again.
Reportedly, her ex-boyfriends’ mother, with whom she stayed for part of that time, told Brawley that she should go home to avoid getting into trouble and that Brawley replied, “I'm already in trouble.”
Later, she would say that she was abducted by men in a vehicle who knocked her out by striking her the on the head, took her her to the woods, raped her and otherwise abused her, peed in her mouth, smeared her with shit and wrote racist stuff on her body. The N.Y. Times reports…
When she was found four days after her disappearance, her hair was cut, she was smeared with excrement and her schoolbooks and purse were missing.
According to the N.Y. Times, she was cleaned up, taken to the hospital and treated for a minor bruise on her scalp but had no other injuries according to the hospital spokeswoman.
Eventually she told her tale, but her tale was a hoax, seemingly meant to fool her parents to avoid punishment for not going home or contacting her family for 4 nights. As the N.Y. Times would later write…
the case became a national racial controversy.
It was an…
infamous race-baiting case.
…as the N.Y. Post put it. As I remember it, no one stopped to wonder if she was telling the truth. People were automatically shocked, disgusted and outraged. Civil rights activist and Baptist preacher Reverend Al Sharpton championed her cause. It brought him fame. Well, that and his hair.
It was a media circus. It seemed as if Al Sharpton was on the news every night giving little speeches in that Baptist preacher style, going on and on, not just about what had supposedly happened to Brawley but also about how this happened because society is so racist. People marched for her and donated money. The N.Y. Post would later write...
Celebrities lined up to support Tawana, including Bill Cosby, who posted a $25,000 reward for information on the case; Don King, who promised $100,000 for Brawley’s education; and Spike Lee, who in his 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing,” included a shot of a graffiti message reading, “Tawana told the truth.”
According to the Times Herald in 2006…
In December 1987, more than 1,000 people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, march in Brawley's support through the city streets.
Even then, it was clear that Farrakhan was…
an out-and-proud Jew-hating weirdo
…as the National Review put it. You may remember when Farrakhan said “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-termite!” You may remember that this was ok with Twitter, which would be fine if they allowed it out of the principle of freedom of speech. But we know they are not for freedom of speech. So, what was their motive for allowing it when they are so quick to censor so much? The National Review reports that despite his anti-Semitism (some may say because of it)…
Democrats still feel the need to make gestures of obeisance before him: Anti-Trump leaders such as Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March have embraced Farrakhan and courted his favor. Barack Obama came a-calling in 2005 when he was ramping up his political career. The Congressional Black Caucus has consulted him. Bill Clinton stood alongside him at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, implicitly elevating the cult leader. California Democrats Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters attend Farrakhan’s public events, and Obama-administration veteran Eric Holder recently posed for a picture with him.
…
Newly elected Representative Ilhan Omar apparently cannot open her mouth without letting out an anti-Semitic libel accusing Jews of being unpatriotic (the “dual loyalty” canard) and of bribing U.S. political leaders into supporting Israel. The Jews, she insists, “push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Representative Rashida Tlaib has similar problems and turns out to have been a contributor to one of Farrakhan’s batty publications. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America — Representative Ocasio-Cortez is a member — recently chanted eliminationist slogans calling for the liquidation of the Jewish state.
…
Even their anti-Americanism is not quite as poisonous.
…
The Democrats bucked at being called socialists until their revolutionary vanguard began to come out as frank socialists. They complain about being called anti-Semites, too, which is a funny thing for friends and associates of Louis Farrakhan and Ilhan Omar to do.
Back to Tawana Brawley. N.Y. Times reports that because she said she was raped, they tested and…
following normal procedure, the specimens and samples were sealed and turned over to the F.B.I. for testing. Investigators said the results showed no evidence that Miss Brawley had been raped, sodomized or sexually abused in any way, though they cautioned that such tests might not have detected sexual acts that occurred days earlier.
Medical officials also said that, while Miss Brawley had been smeared with feces - identified as nonhuman and probably dog feces - she was not suffering from exposure, malnutrition or any serious injury. Investigators said that Miss Brawley apparently had not been beaten, kept outdoors for lengthy periods of time or deprived of food during the days she was missing.
Indeed…
State investigators have said that not a single piece of evidence has emerged to support her account. And investigators have doubts about the second-hand accounts provided by her family and lawyers.
On June 16, 1988, the N.Y. Times reported…
Saying he was now investigating the possibility of a hoax by Tawana Brawley's advisers, Robert Abrams, the New York State Attorney General, announced yesterday that he had subpoenaed a former associate of the advisers who had publicly called the family's story a fabrication.
The associate, Perry McKinnon, a former aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton, said in a television interview yesterday that the advisers themselves doubted the story of a racially motivated abduction and rape of the 16-year old black schoolgirl last November and that ''the two lawyers and Sharpton were making it up as they went along.''
''There was no case, only a media show,'' Mr. McKinnon told WCBS-TV. He said that he had been barred from trying to corroborate Miss Brawley's story and that he had been surprised by their assertions - for which he said they had no evidence - that white law-enforcement officials, whom they accused by name, had attacked Miss Brawley.
…
He also said that he had helped count thousands of dollars in contributions solicited for the Brawleys by the advisers, even after they privately expressed doubts about the truthfulness of her account.
Mr. McKinnon was also quoted in yesterday's issue of The Daily News as calling the case ''nothing but a pack of lies.''
Mr. Sharpton and the lawyers, Alton H. Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason, called Mr. McKinnon ''a liar.'' Their response came during a live television appearance at a Brooklyn church, where Miss Brawley's mother, Glenda, has sought refuge from arrest after ignoring a subpoena to appear before a special state grand jury investigating the case.
…
The advisers have steadfastly refused to cooperate with the investigation, terming it a cover-up and suggesting that the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan and the Irish Republican Army had conspired with the state to thwart a fair investigation.
Mr. Abrams, the special prosecutor in the stalemated case, said that if Mr. McKinnon's allegations were true, Mr. Sharpton and the lawyers ''have been consciously perpetrating a hoax, not only on the black community but on all the people of the state of New York.''
...
In yesterday's WCBS-TV broadcasts, Mr. McKinnon said on camera that Miss Brawley's mother, Glenda, knew that Tawana had spent time in the family's former apartment in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., during the four days last November when the girl later indicated she was being held and sexually assaulted by up to six white men.
Mr. McKinnon said he warned Mr. Maddox that ''something is wrong with the case, watch it.'' He said he did not see anything indicating Miss Brawley had been raped.
He then quoted Mr. Maddox as replying, ''I'm not going to pursue it legally, I'm going to pursue it politically.''
He also quoted the lawyer as saying, ''I don't care about no facts.'' He said that Mr. Sharpton agreed with a suggestion that his aide look into the case, but, Mr. McKinnon said, Mr. Maddox disagreed. ''He says: 'No, I don't think we need it. We don't need no investigation.' ''
'Not About Tawana'
He said he became convinced that ''this case is not about Tawana.'' Instead, he said, ''it's about Mason, Maddox and Sharpton sort of taking over the town, so to speak.''
He said, ''Their exact words were, 'We beat this, we will be the biggest niggers in New York.' '' The words, he said, were Mr. Sharpton's.
The first public accusation by Mr. Maddox against a Dutchess County assistant district attorney, Steven A. Pagones, whom the Brawley advisers cited as an attacker of Miss Brawley, caught everyone by surprise, Mr. McKinnon said. He said he had never heard any evidence backing up the accusation, which the official has denied.
''A lot of things that were said at those news conferences were instantaneous, unplanned, out of emotion,'' Mr. McKinnon said. He also said that he had been ''a counter'' - counting some of the funds that flowed to the Brawley family through church rallies and mailed contributions. One rally produced as much as $4,300 and others from $1,500 up, he said.
''And they allegedly gave all this to the Brawley family,'' he said. ''Now, plus, I've seen envelopes of checks and cash and monies come in through the mail from all over the United States.'' Some, he said, was ''stuffed in'' a big office envelope.
'Frauds, From the Beginning'
Asked by a WCBS-TV correspondent, Mike Taibbi, whether they continued to solicit the money after Mr. Sharpton had himself expressed doubts about the truthfulness of Miss Brawley's story, Mr. McKinnon said that they had.
''They are frauds, from the beginning,'' he said.
Asked if he knew what had happened to Miss Brawley, Mr. McKinnon said, ''The Tawana Brawley story may be that there is no Tawana Brawley story.''
He added: ''The real story is a political agenda by Sharpton, Maddox and Mason.''
''Perry McKinnon is a baldfaced liar and a desperate man,'' Mr. Maddox said on the Phil Donahue show, which was broadcast yesterday from the Bethany Baptist Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where Glenda Brawley had sought sanctuary from an arrest order for defying a grand jury subpoena.
Mr. Maddox said he would never have discussed the case with outsiders like Mr. McKinnon.
It would be written in 1991…
The great paradox of Brawley was that this dumb show went on for months, encouraged by the authorities and the media. The "white power structure" – as Sharpton calls it – all but propped up the advisers' shaky scenarios. The governor and the attorney general, their eyes on electoral politics as well as the case, gave the appearance of trying to avoid offense to any constituency, black or white.
Reportedly, one of the men accused of raping Brawley, Dutchess County assistant district attorney, Steven A. Pagones, sued her and her advisors, including Al Sharpton. He was awarded $345,000 in damages from Sharpton and the other advisors. He also…
sued Ms. Brawley, who never appeared at the trial; her damages were later set by the judge
…for $185,000 according to the N.Y. Times. Sharpton, for his part, owed $65,000 and this was paid by his supporters the N.Y. Times would report. Pagones reportedly claimed that Sharpton never apologized. He did, however, run for president as a Democrat. They report that Pagones’…
life was derailed by a racially charged accusation that a New York State investigation later found to be a hoax. But these days, he says, he focuses on moving forward rather than on the nationally notorious events that ensnared him.
However, Brawley had not paid him any of the $185,000 she was ordered to pay him. In 2012, it was reported by the N.Y. Post, that with interest, Brawley owed Pagones $429,000. They wrote that Pagones said…
“In all these years, she’s never told the truth about this hoax or paid me a cent.”
In 2007, the (New York) Daily News reported…
She changed her name, converted to Islam, moved south and got a bullmastiff "trained to bite" in case someone unwanted comes to visit.
…
Co-workers at the nursing home that employs her know her by the name listed on her nursing license, Tawana Thompson.
They also report that her mother and step-father
have not spoken publicly since a grand jury in 1988 decided there was no evidence their daughter was raped, yet they agreed to talk to The News for one reason: They are adamant that their daughter was raped and the men who did it were never punished.
"I could be looking at the television any day and they say the 'Tawana Brawley hoax,'" King said. "What hoax?"
"How could we make this up and take down the state of New York? We're just regular people," Glenda Brawley said to her husband. "We should be millionaires."
The report says that her mother and step-father say that she really was raped and that the state of NY tried to cover it up which is why it was ruled to be a hoax. According to this report from 2007, her mother and step-father were still flogging the dead horse…
Their words paint a story that is either one of the largest failures in the history of the justice system or a disturbing lie orchestrated years ago, still told with conviction 20 years later.
"They pulled her hair out by the roots and scribbled nasty things all over her," King said, sitting at a table inside an Applebee's restaurant about 30 miles from their house. "I carried her out of the hospital in my arms. She had no clothes on. We wrapped her in a sheet. The feces were still in her hair."
…
"We're going to fight this case all the way to the end," Glenda Brawley said. "[The rapists] ain't going to heaven with something weighing heavy on them. Maybe they'll release it after all these years. I can look my daughter in her big, brown eyes and myself in the mirror. Can they?
Brawley, now 35, rarely emerges from her self-imposed exile these days, returning to New York only as a guest of the United African Movement, established by Sharpton and her lawyers to lend her name to civil rights cases. She accepts free flights and limousine rides from the group to merely appear at its events.
Brawley's family said she does not wear a hijab, or head scarf, but is a devout Muslim, a conversion that began during the trial when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan gave her the name Maryam Muhammad.
Her parents, who are Christians, said she can call any mosque in the world and will be provided with security, if her advisers from New York or her specially trained dog cannot protect her.
They say Brawley enjoys traveling. She has been to Africa twice, to Jamaica, the Bahamas and Aruba on vacation.
Hate Hoaxes can be quite lucrative, it seems.
In 2013, USA Today reported that her employers were ordered to garnish her wages. At that time, NPR reported…
It's been 15 years. With interest, the judgment against the now 40-year-old Brawley has grown to more than $430,000. Finally, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports, Pagones is receiving some of the money: $3,700, or about 1 percent of what he's now owed.
The N.Y. Post reported at the time that Brawley…
still owes Pagones $431,000 in damages. And she remains defiantly unapologetic.
“It’s a long time coming,” said Pagones, 52, who to this day is more interested in extracting a confession from Brawley than cash. “Every week, she’ll think of me,” he told The Post. “And every week, she can think about how she has a way out — she can simply tell the truth.”
…
“Finally, she’s paying something,” said Pagones’ attorney, Gary Bolnick. “Symbolically, I think it’s very important — you can’t just do this stuff without consequences.”
Brawley apparently tried to change her identity to evade the consequences of her actions. They also write…
Before The Post came knocking, not even her own co-workers knew she was the teen behind the spectacular 1987 case.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone about that,” Brawley growled after a Post reporter confronted her about her sordid past in December.
Employing aliases including Tawana Thompson and Tawana Gutierrez, she leads a relatively normal life by all appearances, residing in a neat brick apartment complex and working as a licensed practical nurse at The Laurels of Bon Air in Richmond.
The N.Y. Post would report in 2013…
The jurors, who heard from 180 witnesses over seven months, concluded in 1988 that the entire story was a hoax.
They determined Brawley had run away from home and concocted the story — most likely to avoid punishment from her stepfather, Ralph King, who had spent seven years in prison in the 1970s for killing his first wife.
…
“It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims,” state Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman wrote at the time.
Also…
Sharpton, now a national figure, has never apologized for his role in the hoax.
Sharpton has enjoyed a long career in films and television. He’s currently the host of PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton on MSNBC and is included among the top cast on Deadline: White House on MSNBC, The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart, Morning Joe, American Voices with Alicia Menendez, and Symone and has, this year, appeared on Alex Witt Reports, The Beat with Ari Melbar, American Voices with Alicia Menendez, The Janet Jackson Mini Series, the documentary An American Street Mural in Harlem and the documentary Untitled Rudy Giuliani Documentary and he will be appearing in a documentary called Bowl of Dreams U.0 in 2023 along with Bill Cosby, Barack Obama and others.
MSNBC continues to prominently feature the Reverend Al Sharpton. He was Jussie Smollett before Jussie Smollett was in the matter of the Tawana Brawley hate-crime/rape hoax, and his rabble-rousing attacks on Jewish “bloodsuckers” and “interlopers” preceded the mass murder at Freddie’s Fashion Mart. He inflamed anti-Semitic passions leading up to the Crown Heights riots. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes apparently are content to be affiliated with him.
In the end, crime did not pay for Tawana Brawley but crime pays very, very well for Al Sharpton.
One more thing. This happened…
Thanks for reading, ~ Justin Trouble Be sure to see... Hate Hoax History I - The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion Hate Hoax History II - The Tawana Brawly & Al Sharpton Hate Crime Hoax Hate Hoax History III - "Skinheads" and Backward Swastikas Hate Hoax History IV - Americans Believe Outrageous Lies About Racism in America Hate Hoax History V - When Sarah Silverman Lost Her Sense of Humor
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Liberty my right ∴ Truth my sword
Laughter my shield ∴ Knowledge my steed
Love my solace ∴ Honor my rewardParaphrased from ABRAMS CONSIDERS A POSSIBLE HOAX IN BRAWLEY CASE by the N.Y. Times, June 16, 1988
Great article! This made me laugh:
"How could we make this up and take down the state of New York? We're just regular people," Glenda Brawley said to her husband. "We should be millionaires."
That last sentence says it all. Even as a kid I always though that Al Sharpton was a race-baiting POS and that people are fools making him rich.