Tawana Brawley

Pagones also sued Brawley. She defaulted by not appearing at the trial, and the judge ordered her to pay Pagones damages of $185,000. 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. 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. The following month a court ordered her wages garnished to pay Pagones.

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 $395 million. 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. 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.

In a 1997 appearance, Brawley maintained she did not invent the story; she still had supporters. 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 General Eliot Spitzer and Governor Andrew Cuomo to reopen the case. They also said that Brawley would speak at any legal proceedings. As of 2013, Brawley lives in Virginia, under a new name.

The case highlighted mistrust of legal institutions within the black community. 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." These comments aroused controversy as well; Suzanna Sherry responded to Williams in her 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." 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.

In April 1989, New York Newsday published claims by a boyfriend of Brawley's, Daryl Rodriguez, that she had told him the story was fabricated, with help from her mother, in order to avert the wrath of her stepfather. Writing about the case in a 2004 book on perceptions of racial violence, sociologist Jonathan Markovitz concluded "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."

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 herself may have created the appearance of such an attack. Steven Pagones, the New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused of being one of her assailants, later successfully sued Brawley and her three advisers for defamation.

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". 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.

Under the authority of New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams, a grand jury was called to hear evidence. On October 6, 1988, the grand jury released its 170-page report concluding Brawley had not been abducted, assaulted, raped or sodomized, as Brawley and her advisers said. The report further concluded that the "unsworn public allegations against Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steven 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.

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. The Brawley family then fled New York state, travelling around the country for several months before settling in Virginia Beach.

On November 28, 1987, Brawley was found in a trash bag. She had racial slurs written on her body and was covered in feces. She accused four white men of raping her. The charges received widespread national attention because of her age (15), the persons accused (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney), and the state in which Brawley was found after the alleged rape. Brawley's advisers Al Sharpton, Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason also helped the case to gain prominence.

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 "KKK", "nigger", and "bitch" were discovered written on her torso with charcoal.

Public response to Brawley's story was at first mostly sympathetic. Bill Cosby offered a $25,000 reward for information on the case, while Don King pledged $100,000 toward Brawley's education. 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.

Tawana Vicenia Brawley (born December 15, 1971) is an African-American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York, who accused four white men of raping her in November 1987.