Justice at last
From the
New York Post:
Now pay up, Tawana
Twenty-five years after a teenage Tawana Brawley falsely dragged his name through the mud as a gang-raping, kidnapping racist, it�s payback time for Steven Pagones, a former Dutchess County prosecutor whom she still owes $429,000, including interest, on a 1998 defamation judgment.
�In all these years, she�s never told the truth about this hoax or paid me a cent,� he said yesterday.
�Now I�m going to seek anything I�m entitled to under the law,� Pagones said in response to a Sunday Post exclusive that revealed Brawley is working under a new name, Tawana Gutierrez, as a licensed practical nurse in a Richmond, Va., nursing home.
�I�m going to serve papers seeking to garnish her wages within the next couple of weeks,� he said. �This is all about accountability.�
For those that do not remember the story:
Brawley was only 15 years old in 1987 when, after going missing for four days, she was found curled up in a garbage bag near her home in Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County. She was smeared in feces, and the words �n----r�and �b---h� were scrawled on her in charcoal, with �KKK� carved into her shoe.
Brawley, who is black, claimed she was abducted and gang raped repeatedly by six white men, one of whom she said wore a badge.
A week after her �abduction,� Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., 28, committed suicide over a break-up with his girlfriend and his flunking of a state police exam.
The Rev. Al Sharpton seized on the suicide as �proof� Crist was one of Brawley�s rapists. When Pagones offered an alibi for Crist, Sharpton � with Brawley lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason � called Pagones guilty, too.
As Brawley stood silent, Pagones, Crist and Scott Patterson, a state trooper who found Crist�s body, were painted as racist brutes � until the following year, when a state grand jury found she had made the whole thing up.
It took until 1998 for Pagones to get some satisfaction in the civil courts. A Dutchess County judge issued a $185,000 defamation judgment against Brawley, but she had vanished by then. With interest, her debt is now $429,000.
Sharpton paid his $66,000 judgment to Pagones, with help from OJ Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran and others. Maddox has forked over his own bill of $97,000, and Mason, now disbarred and a Baptist minister, is getting his wages garnished for his $188,000 bill.
Pagones hadn�t been actively seeking Brawley out, he said, but now that he knows where she is, he is eager to hold her accountable.
Actions have consequences. Had she come forward, she would be in a lot less hurt. Why didn't Sharpton, Maddox and Mason come to the aid of this 15-year-old little girl? I mean Brawley was obviously in over her head and these morons manipulated her to their own rent-seeking advantage until the truth came out.
Posted by DaveH at December 26, 2012 8:49 AM