POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. -- Everything is different now. Ten years after 15-year-old Tawana Brawley was found covered with human feces and racist graffiti and sitting inside a plastic bag outside an apartment complex near this Hudson River city, she isn't Tawana Brawley anymore.
Call her Maryann Muhammad, the name that Louis Farrakhan gave her, or Tawana Thompson. She lives in the Prince George's County suburb of Temple Hills and works at a Washington hospital. And she doesn't speak publicly of the attack that a grand jury investigated in 1988 and determined to be Tawana's own doing. A hoax.
Until this week, when everything is suddenly the same again. The three New York City activists who proclaimed Brawley's case to the media 10 years ago -- the Rev. Al Sharpton and former lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox Jr. -- are defendants in a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit that opened here yesterday. And Brawley, 25, has reappeared in New York City for the first time in nine years, adding new fuel to what once was one of the country's most controversial cases.
"I'm not a liar and I'm not crazy," she told a supportive crowd of 600 African-Americans at Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church. Brawley, however, has refused to testify in the civil case here. The defamation suit was filed nine years ago by a former Dutchess County assistant district attorney. The lawyer, Steven Pagones, was accused by Sharpton, Mason and Maddox -- though he was never publicly named by Brawley or charged by prosecutors -- of being one of six men who allegedly abducted, raped and scrawled graffiti on the teen-ager.
The three activists, repeatedly asked for evidence for their accusation, have produced none. They claim a massive cover-up has denied them the evidence they need to prove Brawley's charges. "It's going to get hot, very hot, inside that courtroom," says Michael Hardy, the attorney for Sharpton.
Brawley, who by most accounts was troubled, disappeared from her family's Dutchess County home on Nov. 24, 1987, and was not seen for four days. Brawley claimed to have been abducted by white men carrying police badges and tortured for four days. But an eyewitness claimed to have seen her crawl into the bag. No physical evidence of rape was discovered.
The three activists seized on an unrelated suicide victim, a part-time policeman who left a note bemoaning his failure to become a state trooper, and argued that the dead man was one attacker. After Pagones, a friend of the officer's, disputed the charge, Sharpton, Mason and Maddox announced that Pagones was an attacker.
