Tawana Brawley Pays For Lies; When Will Sharpton?
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Tawana Brawley speaks to reporters with her adviser, the Rev. Al Sharpton, in this Oct. 8, 1988, photo from Chicago. AP
A quarter-century after a black teenager falsely accused an innocent white man of rape, she has begun paying reparations for her slander. The man who rocketed to fame on her falsehoods is still at it.
If ever there was a case of racial injustice it was the case of Tawana Brawley and Steven Pagones, except the roles of victim and perpetrator were reversed in the parallel universe of the racial grievance industry.
\The master of that universe is Al Sharpton.
Pagones is not as well-known as George Zimmerman, nor is he likely to be now, given the media's subservience to that grievance industry. But 25 years ago the former New York prosecutor was accused of rape by Brawley, then just 15 years old.
Sharpton, the man who demanded justice for Tawana as she told her blatantly false story, is the man who now demands justice for Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot by neighborhood-watch volunteer Zimmerman, who was found not guilty of second-degree murder in what a jury ruled was legitimate self-defense.
As the New York Post reports, Tawana Brawley has finally started payment on a defamation judgment awarded Pagones. He sued Brawley and her handlers, including Sharpton, alleging the story that she was abducted and raped by a gang of white men, including Pagones, was a hoax. A grand jury, which heard from 180 witnesses over seven months, concluded in 1988 that the entire story was indeed apocryphal.
Last week, 10 checks totaling $3,764.61 were delivered to Pagones, the first from Brawley on the 1998 judgment on which she still has $431,000 left to pay.
Brawley, who quickly disappeared from public view and moved about under several aliases, was finally tracked down by the Post and found to be working as a licensed practical nurse in Hopewell, Va.
Pagones filed for garnishment of her wages to pay the judgment with the circuit court in Surry County, Va., in January and won. Brawley must now pay Pagones $627 each month, possibly for the rest of her life, having the right under Virginia law to appeal the garnishment every six months.
Brawley's advisers in the infamous race-baiting case, the Rev. Al Sharpton and attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, have already paid, or are paying, their defamation debt. At least the monetary part.
Sharpton has never paid in human terms for the damage done to Pagones' life, which quickly unraveled, even as Sharpton's career as a race-baiting hustler pushed him forward to his current job as an MSNBC commentator. Pagones' marriage collapsed, and he left his job as a prosecutor.
Sharpton has made a career of racial incitement. He once called Jews "diamond merchants" and described whites moving businesses into Harlem as "interlopers."
He helped incite three days of anti-Semitic rioting in 1991 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, turning a tragic traffic accident into a riot where two people died and more than 100 were wounded.
Then there was Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem in 1995, subject to the Sharpton campaign to drive out "interlopers." To scare the Jewish owner away, Sharpton turned a tenant-landlord dispute into a racial conflict, resulting in arson of the store and seven deaths.
Pagones, who now works as a private investigator, has said he'd forgive Brawley's debt if only she would apologize and admit the truth. Brawley has not and says she will not. Nor has Sharpton, who's been rewarded with an MSNBC forum to spew his racially divisive venom.
And the mainstream media yawn.
Sharpton long ago should have been mocked and shunned, if not incarcerated. That he has not been is the ultimate injustice here.
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