Ol’Otis
The Picasso of the Ghetto
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/booming/revisiting-the-tawana-brawley-rape-scandal.html?_r=0
The news reports at the time, in the late 1980s, were horrific. Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl from the New York City area, was said to have been abducted and repeatedly raped by six white men. She was found with “KKK” written across her chest, a racial epithet on her stomach and her hair smeared with feces. She was so traumatized, according to reports, that at the hospital she answered yes-or-no questions by blinking her eyes. Making the crime even more vile, if that were possible, she and her lawyers later claimed that two of the rapists were law enforcement officials.
Ms. Brawley’s spokesman was the Rev. Al Sharpton — a dapper television personality and political commentator these days, but a fiery street activist back then. At a news conference, he named suspects.
“We have the facts and the evidence that an assistant district attorney and a state trooper did this,” Mr. Sharpton said. He called Gov. Mario M. Cuomo a racist and warned that powerful state officials were complicit. When asked whether Ms. Brawley would speak with the state attorney general, Robert Abrams, Mr. Sharpton said that would be like asking someone in a concentration camp to talk to Hitler.
But, as the meticulously researched Retro Report points out this week, it was all a hoax. After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way, the report concluded.
A Sharpton associate told the news media at the time that Ms. Brawley’s lawyers, C. Vernon Mason and Alton H. Maddox Jr., and Mr. Sharpton were “frauds from the beginning.”
And about six months after the hoax, Ms. Brawley’s former boyfriend told Newsday that she had invented the allegations, apparently to avoid a beating by her mother’s boyfriend after running away from home for four days.
Last week, Retro Report interviewed Mr. Sharpton and asked whether, 25 years later, he felt that any crime had occurred at all.
“Whatever happened,” he answered, “you’re dealing with a minor who was missing four days. So it’s clear that something wrong happened.”
Not exactly contrite.
As for Ms. Brawley, the video notes that she is now working as a nurse in Virginia under another name and has refused to explain her actions publicly. However, there is archival footage of an interview with her from many years back, in which she said: “What did I lie about? Lie about what? The grand jury to me didn’t really exist — that was all a farce.”
The report is the fifth in a weekly series that re-examines leading stories of decades past. The videos are typically 10 to 12 minutes long and are part of a collaboration between The New York Times and Retro Report, a documentary news organization formed last year.
The news reports at the time, in the late 1980s, were horrific. Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl from the New York City area, was said to have been abducted and repeatedly raped by six white men. She was found with “KKK” written across her chest, a racial epithet on her stomach and her hair smeared with feces. She was so traumatized, according to reports, that at the hospital she answered yes-or-no questions by blinking her eyes. Making the crime even more vile, if that were possible, she and her lawyers later claimed that two of the rapists were law enforcement officials.
Ms. Brawley’s spokesman was the Rev. Al Sharpton — a dapper television personality and political commentator these days, but a fiery street activist back then. At a news conference, he named suspects.
“We have the facts and the evidence that an assistant district attorney and a state trooper did this,” Mr. Sharpton said. He called Gov. Mario M. Cuomo a racist and warned that powerful state officials were complicit. When asked whether Ms. Brawley would speak with the state attorney general, Robert Abrams, Mr. Sharpton said that would be like asking someone in a concentration camp to talk to Hitler.
But, as the meticulously researched Retro Report points out this week, it was all a hoax. After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way, the report concluded.
A Sharpton associate told the news media at the time that Ms. Brawley’s lawyers, C. Vernon Mason and Alton H. Maddox Jr., and Mr. Sharpton were “frauds from the beginning.”
And about six months after the hoax, Ms. Brawley’s former boyfriend told Newsday that she had invented the allegations, apparently to avoid a beating by her mother’s boyfriend after running away from home for four days.
Last week, Retro Report interviewed Mr. Sharpton and asked whether, 25 years later, he felt that any crime had occurred at all.
“Whatever happened,” he answered, “you’re dealing with a minor who was missing four days. So it’s clear that something wrong happened.”
Not exactly contrite.
As for Ms. Brawley, the video notes that she is now working as a nurse in Virginia under another name and has refused to explain her actions publicly. However, there is archival footage of an interview with her from many years back, in which she said: “What did I lie about? Lie about what? The grand jury to me didn’t really exist — that was all a farce.”
The report is the fifth in a weekly series that re-examines leading stories of decades past. The videos are typically 10 to 12 minutes long and are part of a collaboration between The New York Times and Retro Report, a documentary news organization formed last year.
yeah ok.
