Tawana Vicenia Brawley[1] (born December 15, 1971)[1][2] is an African American woman from New York who gained notoriety in November 1987 at age 15 when she falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her over a four-day period.
On November 28, 1987, Brawley was found in a trash bag after having been missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York. She had racial slurs written on her body and was covered in feces. The feces came from a collie owned by a resident of the building where Brawley was found. Brawley accused four white men of having raped her. The charges received national attention in part because of the appalling condition in which she had been left, her young age, and the professional status of the persons she accused of the crime (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney). Brawley's advisers—Al Sharpton, Alton H. Maddox, and C. Vernon Mason—helped in bringing the case to national prominence.[3]
After hearing evidence, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault, and that she may have created the appearance of such an attack herself.[2][4] Steven Pagones, the Greek American New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as being one of her assailants, later successfully sued Brawley and her three advisers for defamation.[4][5][6]
Brawley received support from the African American community.[7] Some academics have suggested that Brawley was victimized by biased reporting that was influenced by racial stereotypes.[8][9] The mainstream media's coverage drew heated criticism from the African American press, and from many black leaders who believed the teenager and her story.[10] The grand jury's conclusions decreased support for Brawley and her advisers; Brawley's family have maintained that the allegations were true.
Origins of the case
On November 28, 1987, Tawana Brawley, who had been missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York, was found seemingly unconscious and unresponsive, lying in a garbage bag several feet from an apartment where she had once lived. Her clothing was torn and burned, her body smeared with feces. She was taken to the emergency room, where the words "Pimp-Nigger" and "KKK" were discovered written on her torso with charcoal.[2]
A detective from the sheriff's juvenile aid bureau, among others, was summoned to interview Brawley, but she remained unresponsive. The family requested a black officer, which the police department was able to provide. Brawley, described as having an "extremely spacey" look on her face, communicated with this officer with nods of the head, shrugs of the shoulder, and written notes. The interview lasted 20 minutes, during which she uttered only one word: "neon". Through gestures and writing, however, she indicated she had been raped repeatedly in a wooded area by six white men, at least one of whom, she said, was a police officer.[11]
A sexual assault kit was administered, and police began building a case. Brawley provided no names or descriptions of her assailants. She later told others that there had been no rape, only other kinds of sexual abuse. Forensic tests found no evidence of sexual assault or sexual intercourse. There was no evidence of exposure to elements, which would have been expected in a victim held for several days in the woods at a time when the temperature dropped below freezing at night.[11]
Public response
Al Sharpton (pictured in 2006) helped handle Brawley's publicity.
The initial public response to Brawley's story was mostly sympathetic. Bill Cosby offered a $25,000 reward for information on the case, while Don King pledged $100,000 toward Brawley's education.[12] In December 1987, more than one thousand people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, marched through the streets of Newburgh, New York, in support of Brawley.[13]
Brawley's claims in the case captured headlines across the country. Public rallies were held denouncing the incident. When civil rights activist Al Sharpton, with attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, began handling Brawley's publicity, the case quickly became highly controversial.[14] Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason generated a national media sensation. The three said that officials all the way up to the state government were trying to cover up defendants in the case because they were white.[15] They further suggested that the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Republican Army, and the Mafia had conspired with the U.S. government in the alleged cover-up.[16]
Harry Crist Jr. became a suspect in the case because he committed suicide shortly after the period when Brawley was allegedly held captive and was a part-time police officer in Fishkill, New York, which borders Brawley's hometown.[17] Steven Pagones, an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County, New York, attempted to establish an alibi for Crist, stating that he had been with Crist during that period of time. Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason then said that Crist and Pagones were two of the rapists. They also accused Pagones, a Greek American,[5][6] of being a racist and a white supremacist.[15][18] Based on Crist's suicide note, The New York Times reported that he killed himself because his girlfriend ended their relationship shortly before his death, and because he was upset that he was unable to become a state trooper.[17]
The mainstream media's coverage drew heated criticism from the African American press and leaders for its treatment of the teenager.[19][20][21] They cited the leaking and publication of photos taken of her at the hospital, and the revelation of her name despite her being underage.[22] In addition, critics were concerned that Brawley had been left in the custody of her mother, stepfather, and advisers, rather than being given protection by the state. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Martha Miles and Richard L. Madden wrote:[23]
State law provides that if a child appears to have been sexually molested, then the Child Protective Services Agency is supposed to take jurisdiction and custody of that child. Now, Tawana Brawley was 15 at the time of the incident. If that had been done... early on, the agency would have given her psychiatric attention and preserved evidence of rape...
Sharpton's former aide, Perry McKinnon, said that Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason were unconcerned with Brawley, and were using the case to "tak[e] over the town," as he had heard Sharpton say that the case could make him and Brawley's other two advisers "the biggest niggers in New York."[16] In June 1988, at the height of the controversy surrounding the case, a poll showed a gap of 34 percentage points between blacks (51%) and whites (85%) on the question of whether Brawley was lying.[24]
Grand jury hearings
Faced with an uncooperative Brawley, who was advised by Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason to not answer questions, New York governor Mario Cuomo eventually appointed the state's attorney general, Robert Abrams, as special prosecutor for the case. A grand jury was convened to hear evidence, with John M. Ryan, Abrams's assistant in charge of criminal prosecutions, delegated the responsibility of leading the investigation. Brawley's team employed a general strategy of discouraging Brawley and her family from testifying, which they justified by claiming that an unjust refusal by the state to prosecute the alleged attackers was inevitable.[25] Their inflammatory rhetoric and tactics, such as conditioning interviews with investigators on Cuomo, Abrams and Ryan undergoing psychological evaluations, were viewed by many as flippant and inappropriate. Sharpton, in particular, drew criticism for comparing requests to meet with Abrams, known for his strong record on civil rights, to "asking someone who watched someone killed in the gas chamber to sit down with Mr. Hitler." When Roger L. Green, an influential Black member of the New York State Assembly, spoke out against language he perceived as unhelpful and needlessly divisive, Sharpton responded by calling him "a state-sponsored Uncle Tom."[26] On October 6, 1988, the grand jury released its 170-page report that concluded Brawley had not been abducted, assaulted, raped, or sodomized, as Brawley and her advisers said. The report further concluded that the allegations against Pagones were false and had no basis in fact. Before issuing the report, the grand jury heard from 180 witnesses, saw 250 exhibits, and recorded more than 6,000 pages of testimony.[4]
In the decision, the grand jury noted many problems with Brawley's story. Among these were that the rape kit results did not indicate sexual assault. Additionally, despite saying she had been held captive outdoors for days, Brawley was not suffering from hypothermia, was well-nourished, and appeared to have brushed her teeth recently. Despite her clothing being charred, there were no burns on her body. Although a shoe she was wearing was cut through, Brawley had no injuries to her foot. The racial epithets written on her were upside down, which led to suspicion that Brawley herself had written the words. Testimony from her schoolmates indicated she had attended a local party during the time of her supposed abduction. One witness claimed to have observed Brawley's climbing into the garbage bag.[27] The feces on her body were identified as coming from her neighbor's dog.[28] Brawley never testified, despite a subpoena ordering her to do so.[29][30]
On June 6, 1988, Tawana's mother, Glenda Brawley, was sentenced to 30 days in prison, and fined $250 for contempt of court for refusing to testify at the grand jury hearing. She evaded arrest by hiding in churches, with the police failing to arrest her, arguing it would lead to violence.[31] The Brawley family then fled New York state, travelling around the country for several months before settling in Virginia Beach.[32]
Possible motives
Much of the grand jury evidence pointed to a possible motive for Brawley's falsifying the incident: trying to avoid violent punishment from her mother and particularly her stepfather, Ralph King. Witnesses testified that Glenda Brawley had previously beaten her daughter for running away, and for spending nights with boys. King had a history of violence that included stabbing his first wife 14 times, which later escalated into him shooting and killing her. There was considerable evidence that King could and would violently attack Brawley: when Brawley had been arrested on a shoplifting charge the previous May, King attempted to beat her for the offense while at the police station. Witnesses also described King as having talked about his stepdaughter in a sexualizing manner.[33]
On the day of her alleged disappearance, Brawley had skipped school to visit her boyfriend, Todd Buxton, who was serving a six-month jail sentence. When Buxton's mother (with whom she had visited Buxton in jail) urged her to get home before she got in trouble, Brawley told her, "I'm already in trouble." She described how angry King was over a previous incident of her staying out late.[34]
Neighbors also told the grand jury that in February they overheard Glenda Brawley saying to King, "You shouldn't have took the money because after it all comes out, they're going to find out the truth." Another neighbor heard Mrs. Brawley say, "They know we're lying, and they're going to find out and come and get us."[33]
In April 1989, New York Newsday published claims by a boyfriend of Brawley, Daryl Rodriguez, that she had told him the story was fabricated, with help from her mother, to avert the wrath of her stepfather.[35] Writing about the case in a 2004 book on perceptions of racial violence, sociologist Jonathan Markovitz concluded that "it is reasonable to suggest that Brawley's fear and the kinds of suffering that she must have gone through must have been truly staggering if they were enough to force her to resort to cutting her hair, covering herself in feces, and crawling into a garbage bag."[36]
Aftermath
Patricia J. Williams (pictured in 2007) maintained that Brawley was the victim of a crime.
The case highlighted mistrust of legal institutions within the black community.[23] Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams wrote in 1991 that the teenager "has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself."[37] These comments aroused controversy as well; Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry responded to Williams in their book Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, writing "The radical multiculturalists seem unable or unwilling to differentiate between Brawley's fantasized rape and another woman's real one. Indifference to the distinction between fact and fiction minimizes real suffering by implying that it is no worse than imagined or self-inflicted suffering."[38]
Reviewing Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing, cultural critic Stanley Crouch wrote negatively of "men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley's lies."[39] On May 21, 1990, Alton H. Maddox was indefinitely suspended by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn after failing to appear before a disciplinary hearing to answer allegations regarding his conduct in the Brawley case.[40] Vernon Mason was disbarred for 66 cases of misconduct in 1995; while the Brawley case was not specifically cited, Mason claimed that he was being punished for his role in promoting Brawley's accusations.[41]
In 1998 Pagones was awarded $345,000 through a lawsuit for defamation of character that he had brought against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason; Pagones initially sought $395million.[42] The jury found Sharpton liable for making seven defamatory statements about Pagones, Maddox for two and Mason for one. The jury deadlocked on four of the 22 statements over which Pagones had sued, and it found eight statements to be non-defamatory.[43] In a later interview, Pagones said the turmoil caused by the accusations of Brawley and her advisers had cost him his first marriage and much personal grief.[44]
Pagones also sued Brawley. She defaulted by not appearing at the trial, and the judge ordered her to pay Pagones damages of $185,000.[45] The $65,000 judgment levied against Al Sharpton was paid for him in 2001 by supporters, including attorney Johnnie Cochran and businessman Earl G. Graves, Jr.[46] In December 2012, the New York Post reported that Maddox had paid his judgment of $97,000 and Mason was making payments on the $188,000 which he owed. Brawley reportedly had not made any payments.[47] The following month a court ordered her wages garnished to pay Pagones.[12][48][49]
In a 1997 appearance Brawley maintained she did not invent the story; she still had supporters.[50] In November 2007, Brawley's stepfather and mother, in a 20th-anniversary feature for the New York Daily News, contended the attack happened. "How could we make this up and take down the state of New York? We're just regular people," Glenda Brawley said. They said they had asked New York State Attorney GeneralAndrew Cuomo and GovernorEliot Spitzer to reopen the case. They also said that Brawley would speak at any legal proceedings.[51] As of 2013, Brawley works as a nurse in rural Virginia, under a new name.[52][53] Influenced by her interactions with Louis Farrakhan who had supported her, Brawley converted to Islam during the trial and, according to a NY Daily News report in November 2007, she remains a member of the Nation of Islam.[53]
Michael Hardy, who served as Sharpton's defense lawyer in Pagones' defamation case against him, would in 1991 become a prominent founder of Sharpton's organization National Action Network, where he served as Executive Vice President and later also General Counsel.[54][55][56]
Brawley appeared alongside Sharpton in the music video for Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", which was directed and produced by Lee.[57]
The 1990 Law & Order episode "Out of the Half-Light" is a fictionalized retelling of the Brawley case.[58] The case is also discussed in the 2014 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Criminal Stories".
Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is an American civil rights and social justice activist, Baptist minister, radio talk show host, and TV personality, who is also the founder of the National Action Network civil rights organization. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election. He hosts a weekday radio talk show, Keepin' It Real, which is nationally syndicated by Urban One, and he is a political analyst and weekend host for MSNBC, hosting PoliticsNation.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American male teenagers accused of raping two white women in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a legal injustice in the United States legal system.
C. Vernon Mason is a former lawyer and civil rights advocate from Tucker, Arkansas. Best known for his involvement in several high-profile New York City cases in the 1980s, including the Bernhard Goetz, Howard Beach, and Tawana Brawley incidents, Mason has not practiced law since his 1995 disbarment. He then served as the CEO of a non-profit organization. He is also an ordained minister.
Cheryl Ann Araujo was a Portuguese-American woman from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who was gang-raped in 1983 at age 21 by four men in a tavern in the city. Her case became national news and drew widespread attention to media coverage of rape trials.
Robert Abrams is an American attorney and politician. He served as the attorney general of New York from 1979 to 1993 and was the Democratic nominee for the 1992 United States Senate election in New York.
Alton Henry Maddox Jr. was an American lawyer who was involved in several high-profile civil rights cases in the 1980s.
Craig Wolff is an American journalist and author and a former sports, feature, and news writer for The New York Times. He was a journalism professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a former senior enterprise editor and writer at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.
Roy C. Ketcham High School, more informally Ketcham High School or RCK, is a public secondary school under jurisdiction of the Wappingers Central School District. Located in Wappingers Falls, New York, United States, the school serves approximately 1,600 students in grades nine through twelve residing in the southwest of Dutchess County. Their mascot is the Ketcham Storm.
Michael Griffith was a 23-year-old black man who was killed on December 20, 1986, in Howard Beach, in Queens, New York City, in a racially motivated attack. Griffith and two other black men were set upon by a group of white youths outside a pizza parlor. Two of the victims, including Griffith, were severely beaten. Griffith fled onto a highway where he was fatally struck by a passing motorist.
Crystal Gail Mangum is an American former stripper from Durham, North Carolina who has been incarcerated for murder since 2013. In 2006, she came to attention in national news reports for having made false allegations of rape against lacrosse players in the Duke lacrosse case. Mangum's work in the sex industry as a black woman, while the young men she accused were white, generated extensive media interest and academic debate about race, class, gender, and the politicization of the justice system. In December 2024, Mangum admitted to fabricating the assault.
The Dutchess County Courthouse is located at 10 Market Street in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Built in 1903, it is the third county courthouse to stand on that site.
A racial hoax occurs when a person falsely claims that a crime was committed by member of a specific race. The crime may be fictitious, or may be an actual crime.
The Franklin child prostitution ring allegations began in June 1988 in Omaha, Nebraska, when multiple prominent Nebraska political and business figures were accused of involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. The allegations attracted significant public and political interest until late 1990, when separate state and federal grand juries concluded that the allegations were unfounded and the ring was a "carefully crafted hoax."
Recy Taylor was an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. She was born and raised in a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow era Southern United States. In the 1940s, Taylor's bravery in speaking out about her rape by white men led to organizing in the African-American community for justice and civil rights.
Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie is a 2012 documentary film that chronicles the history of The Morton Downey Jr. Show and Downey's influence on "trash TV."
"A Rape on Campus" is a retracted, defamatory Rolling Stone magazine article written by Sabrina Erdely and originally published on November 19, 2014, that describes a purported group sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rolling Stone retracted the story in its entirety on April 5, 2015. The article claimed that UVA student Jackie Coakley had been taken to a party hosted by UVA's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity by a fellow student and led to a bedroom to be gang raped by several fraternity members as part of a fraternity initiation ritual.
The St. John's lacrosse case was a 1990 criminal case in which some members of the St. John's University men's lacrosse team were accused of raping an African American female. The St. John's Lacrosse rape case was a sports scandal that caused significant controversy within the school, amongst feminists, New York City, and the lacrosse community. This case was a predecessor to the Duke lacrosse case. The case was the basis of a Law & Order episode called "Out of Control".
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
John Michael Ryan is an American lawyer from New York who served as the acting district attorney of Queens County in 2019. Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, he attended St. John's University and its law school. Joining the Queens District Attorney's office as an intern in 1972, he worked there before joining the state attorney general's office, where he led the investigation of the Tawana Brawley rape allegations. Shortly after the appointment of Richard Brown in 1991, he returned to Queens, serving in the district attorney's office for the next 28 years.
Michael A. Hardy was an American civil rights attorney from Brooklyn, New York, who was involved in civil rights and police brutality cases. Hardy is best known for serving as legal counsel for the civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton.
↑ Diamond, Edwin (1991). The Media Show: The Changing Face of the News, 1985–1990. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. The great paradox of Brawley 2 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.
1 2 3 Rosenblatt, Albert M. (2015). "County Legal History"(PDF). The Historical Society of the New York Courts: 39.
↑ "A tense relationship". Times Herald-Record. November 1, 2006. Archived from the original on June 14, 2007. Retrieved April 18, 2008. Some witnesses say they saw Brawley in Newburgh during the time she was missing, but that never was proven. In December 1987, more than 1,000 people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, march in Brawley's support through the city streets. In October 1988, a special grand jury rules Brawley's claims a hoax.
↑ Smith, Robert Charles (2000). Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN978-0-7425-0025-9.[pageneeded]
↑ Friedman, Ellen G. (1998). Morality USA. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. p.69. ISBN9780816627493. For segments of the black press, however, the Brawley story's truth was not in question: the case simply demonstrated the bankruptcy of the white justice system.
↑ Leid, Utrice (May 2, 1989). "It's an outrage!". The City Sun. The same media that demanded Brawley "prove" her sexual assault made no such demands in the Central Park case. The same media that had no difficulty identifying the underaged Wappingers Falls teenager by name, invading the sanctity of her home to show her face and even televising semi-nude pictures of her while she was in the hospital...
↑ "Brawley Case: Stubborn Puzzle, Silent Victim". The New York Times. February 29, 1988. Retrieved January 20, 2008. She vanished on a cold, moonless autumn night in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., from a strip of gas stations and fast-food outlets that stand as a kind of neon-lit mockery of Washington Irving's quaint old haunts up the Hudson.
Chin, Pat (December 12, 1997). "Tawana Brawley Speaks Out". Workers World Party. Retrieved January 14, 2006. (another view of Brawley's appearance in Brooklyn in 1997)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
