November 28, 1987 Joyce Lloray happened to look out of her apartment's
sliding glass door in time to see a black girl climb into a big green plastic
garbage bag and then lay still on the cold, muddy ground. Mrs. Lloray called the
Duchess County Sheriff's Department, setting into motion a chain of bizarre and
tragic events that made the quiet little town of Wappingers Falls, New York --
population 5,000 -- the focus of national attention.
The girl in the trash bag on the grounds of the Pavillion Condominiums was
15-year-old Tawana Brawley. Four days earlier she had played hooky from school
in order to visit a former boyfriend, Todd Buxton, who was incarcerated at the
Orange County Jail in nearby Newburgh. That evening Tawana took a bus to the
town of Wappingers, where she had lived with her mother in Apartment 19A at the
Pavillion Condominiums prior to their moving to Wappingers Falls. According to
Tawana, she was abducted by several white men shortly after she got off the bus;
the men, one of whom wore a badge, took her to a wooded area and sexually abused
her over a period of several days.
When police and paramedics arrived at the Pavillion Condominiums in response to
Joyce Lloray's call, they found Tawana's clothes torn, cut and partially burned.
Her body and clothing were smeared with feces, and on her chest and torso the
words "KKK," "NIGGER" and "BITCH" had been written with what appeared to be
charcoal. Since it seemed that Tawana's civil rights had been violated, the FBI
was called in. A rape kit was administered at St. Francis Hospital and sent
under seal to an FBI lab for analysis. Interviewed at the hospital by a black
officer from the Poughkeepsie Police Department, Tawana claimed she had been
repeatedly raped by a group of white men but could provide 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 that a
sexual assault of any kind had occurred. Nor was there any evidence of exposure
to elements, which would be expected in a victim held for several days in the
woods at a time when the temperature dropped below freezing at night.
There were other discrepancies in Tawana's story. She was seen entering the
empty apartment at Pavillion where she had once lived on the morning after the
alleged abduction. Other witnesses claimed to have seen her at parties in a
nearby town during the period when she was "missing." She had no bruises,
contusions, scratches or other injuries except for a small bruise behind the
left ear, which was determined to be several days old. Her mother, Glenda
Brawley, was spotted at the apartment complex shortly before Tawana was seen
getting into the garbage bag; the mother waited until that same afternoon to
report Tawana's "disappearance" to the police. The investigation turned up
evidence to indicate that the damage done to Tawana's clothing had occurred in
the apartment. According to the grand jury report, all of "the items and
instrumentalities necessary to create the condition in which Tawana Brawley
appeared on Saturday, November 28, were present inside of or in the immediate
vicinity of Apartment 19A." The feces had come from a neighbor's dog.
The Tawana Brawley case was quickly seized upon by a trio of black activists who
viewed it as a means by which to demonstrate that the police and judicial system
were racist and corrupt. Attorney Alton H. Maddox had been beaten by a white mob
as a teenager in Newnan, Georgia; confrontational and virulently anti-white,
Maddox seemed at times less interested in justice than in the potential for
conflict that high profile cases like Tawana Brawley's provided. C. Vernon
Mason, another New York attorney, also used cases to drum up publicity and
address wider issues. Al Sharpton was a flamboyant Pentecostal preacher who
spent $2,000 a year for hair care at Brooklyn's Prima Donna Beauty Salon; his
hunger for celebrity caused some to question both his motives and methods.
Maddox, Mason and Sharpton had joined forces before, in the Howard Beach case a
year earlier. Several black men had been accosted by a white mob and one of
them, Michael Griffith, was chased out onto a highway where he was struck by a
vehicle and killed. In previous cases, Maddox and Mason had used the tactic of
non-cooperation, refusing to let their clients testify in an effort to
facilitate a "miscarriage of justice" in which the perpetrator(s) would get off.
In this way they could heighten the outrage of the black community and claim the
result proved that the judicial system discriminated against blacks.
The trio muzzled Tawana Brawley and claimed everyone from the local police to
New York Governor Mario Cuomo was engaged in a cover-up. The Brawley camp
eventually accused Harry Crist, Jr., a part-time police officer, after Crist
committed suicide on December 2, and Steven A. Pagones, a Duchess County
district attorney, of participating in the alleged abduction and rape. Further
investigation revealed that Crist had killed himself for reasons unconnected
with the Brawley case, while Pagones' testimony convinced the Poughkeepsie grand
jury that he was not involved in any wrongdoing. Undeterred, Maddox, Mason and
Sharpton staged numerous media events, from news conferences and rallies to
appearances on television shows like Phil Donahue and The Morton Downey, Jr.
Show to keep national attention focused on the case.
As time went on, the public grew increasingly skeptical of Tawana Brawley's
charges and the ill-advised tactics of her handlers. When Tawana's mother was
subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and failed to do so, a warrant for
her arrest was issued; Maddox, Mason and Sharpton took her to the Ebenezer
Baptist Church in New York City and organized a rally, hoping (in vain) that the
authorities would force their way into the church and seize her. Two of
Sharpton's associates quit, claiming the reverend had known all along that the
case was a hoax. Other black leaders criticized Brawley's advisers -- Ray Innes
of the Congress of Racial Equality and attorney Conrad Lynn among them. They
feared the hoax and the antics of publicity hounds like Sharpton would prove
detrimental to the cause of racial equality.
After seven months of examining police and medical records and listening to the
testimony of over one hundred witnesses, the grand jury determined that Tawana's
charges were false and that her condition when found had been self-inflicted.
The question remained: Why had she lied? One hypothesis was that since Tawana
had already been grounded on the day she skipped school to visit her
ex-boyfriend, she had made up the story of her abduction in order to avoid
further punishment.
The Brawley case resurfaced a decade later when Steven Pagones filed a defamation suit against Maddox, Mason and Sharpton; he had already won a default judgment against Tawana in 1991. By 1997, Tawana had moved to Washington and changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. She returned to New York to speak before a rally at Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church in support of her advisers, insisting that she had told the truth about the abduction. The court found otherwise. Her advisers were ordered to pay Pagones $345,000 while Tawana had to pay $185,000. "Tawana Brawley appears caught up in her own fiction," said New York State Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman. Unfortunately, the rest of the country had to be caught up in it, too.
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