Tawana Brawley: Case vs. Cause

By Frank Trippett

When Tawana Brawley was discovered climbing into a garbage bag last Nov. 28 in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., her hair was partly chopped away, her head smeared with excrement and her torso marked with the words NIGGER and KKK. The tale sketched by the girl and her mother told of a horrific crime -- the kidnaping, rape and abuse of a black 15-year-old by six white men, one wearing a badge. Last week, after six months of fitful investigations, a judge finally ordered someone to jail -- not a suspect, but the girl's mother Glenda Brawley.

At that, the case lurched from the unusual into the bizarre. On the advice of lawyers, Tawana, now 16, and her mother Glenda, 33, have refused to help investigators. Through advisers, they charged that local authorities with racist motives were protecting the guilty. They demanded an outside investigation. When Governor Mario Cuomo obliged, appointing Attorney General Robert Abrams as special prosecutor, the Brawleys still refused to cooperate. Last week, after Glenda Brawley defied a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in Poughkeepsie, Judge Angelo Ingrassia fined her $250 and sentenced her to 30 days for contempt. The confrontation then revved up to a higher pitch when Mrs. Brawley took refuge in a New York City church to avoid arrest.

"How ludicrous," said her lawyer, C. Vernon Mason, "for the nation to see that the only person arrested in this case is the mother of a black rape victim. People should be outraged." First, however, they should be puzzled. When Mason delivered that line, Glenda Brawley had not been arrested. Moreover, Mason and two other radical Brawley advisers -- Attorney Alton Maddox Jr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton -- had contrived the events that turned her into a fugitive. Nothing could have made the trio happier than the spectacle of police charging into the Ebenezer Baptist Church to capture her. Sharpton, 33, a minister-at-large with a rock-star haircut and a vituperative style, gave voice to their fantasy. "Show the nation the moral beast you are," he challenged the attorney general. "Come through these doors and arrest her." But police made no moves at Ebenezer church or the Brooklyn church to which the mother later shifted.

What was going on? Understanding the impasse requires separating Tawana Brawley's misfortune into two distinct public matters. One, relating to what happened to the girl, is the Tawana Brawley case. The other, a creation of the lawyers and their sidekick preacher, is the Tawana Brawley cause. The aim of the cause is not to solve a crime but to fire up a political movement.

For five years, Maddox, 43, and Mason, 42, have busied themselves in New York cases with controversial racial implications. They represented the black victims attacked by white youths in the notorious Howard Beach case, and Mason defended one of the black teenagers shot by Subway Vigilante Bernhard Goetz. At every opportunity, the two lawyers attempt to put the justice system itself on trial. Says Columbia University Law Professor Gerard E. Lynch: "Mason, whom I know, and Maddox, from what I've read, see the judicial system as fundamentally unjust and racist, and that's the key to their strategy and tactics." Maddox said much the same thing to supporters last week: "Every decision we made in the Howard Beach case and the Tawana Brawley case is based on how it will affect black people."

Blacks are not unanimously grateful for the attention. Along with whites, they remember that Mason unsuccessfully challenged Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau at the polls three years ago, and some suspect that the lawyers are not above advancing their personal ambitions. Moderates of all races have winced at reports that Mason and Maddox have established ties with the fiery black Muslim Louis Farrakhan.

Few could have failed to notice that for all the furor they have raised, the Brawley advisers have hardly helped solve whatever crimes were committed against Tawana Brawley. Wrote New York Daily News Columnist Bob Herbert, who is black: "If Robert Abrams or anybody else wants to send somebody to the slammer for contempt of court, Glenda Brawley has three high-profile advisers who more than qualify."

Unfortunately, little useful information has been added to the story that Tawana Brawley told last November about being abducted on a dark road and held in the woods for four days by a gang of white men. Journalists subsequently < turned up discrepancies in the Brawley family's sketchy accounts of Tawana's absence. Witnesses reported seeing her at parties in a nearby town. Neighbors told of Tawana's prior disappearances and of violent conflicts between mother and daughter. Mason, Maddox and Sharpton subsequently tossed out casual accusations that Tawana's rapists included a Dutchess County assistant district attorney, a state trooper and a part-time policeman who shot himself to death days after the alleged gang rape. Local, state and federal investigators have found no evidence for their charges.

So while the Brawley cause has prospered, the Brawley case has got nowhere. Attorney General Abrams declared at week's end that unless the Brawleys turn about and tell what they know, the "investigation is not going to succeed." Given the prospect of thwarted justice, it was hard to argue with the view expressed by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, who also is black, about Glenda Brawley's new status as a fugitive. "I don't think any purpose would be served by locking up the mother," he said. "The rule of law is important, but this is a unique and strange situation."

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York