On This Day In Black History Nov 28 - Brawley, Tawana Glenda (1972– )
Tawana Brawley is an African American woman from Wappinger’s Falls, New York, who became known when she was 15 years old in 1987 for wrongly accusing four white men for brutally raping her in Dutchess County.
On November 28, 1987, Brawley, who had been missing for four days, was found seemingly unconscious in a garbage bag outside her family’s former apartment. With burned and torn clothes, she was covered in feces and had racial slurs written on her body. Brawley explained that she was abducted by car, brought to the woods, and then s*xually abused and forced into oral s*x. Brawley indicated one of the men who assaulted her was a white cop.
The allegations divided New York City and much of the state, as racial tensions had been growing from recent cases including a white mob attacking three black teens in Queens a year earlier. The Brawley family retained two attorneys, Alton H. Maddox Jr., and C. Vernon Mason.
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..a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible s*xual assault,
and that she may have created the appearance of such an attack.
Steven Pagones, the New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as being one of her assailants,
later SUCCESSFULLY sued Brawley, and Rev. Al Sharpton, Alton H. Maddox, and C. Vernon Mason for defamation.