Tawana Brawley Finally Forced to Pay Man She Defamed

In an exclusive to the New York Post, the paper reported Sunday that after 25 years, former New York prosecutor Steven Pagones is finally getting justice from Tawana Brawley.

The Post reports that Pagones recently received his first payments from Brawley as money is being collected through wage garnishments: $3,764.61 so far, with $431,000 to go. In 1987, Brawley, with the promotional assistance of Rev. Al Sharpton and lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, defamed Pagones in the infamous race-baiting fake rape case that grabbed headlines around the world.

The Post reports the money is not Pagones’s goal, however:

“It’s a long time coming,” said Pagones, 52, who to this day is more interested in extracting a confession from Brawley than cash.

“Every week, she’ll think of me,” he told The Post. “And every week, she can think about how she has a way out — she can simply tell the truth.

As Breitbart News has previously recalled, in November 1987, fifteen year-old black teenager Tawana Brawley was found in Wappinger’s Falls, NY wrapped in a plastic bag, with feces in her hair and with “KKK” and the n-word written on her body. She claimed to have been abducted, then raped and sodomized by six white men. She quickly gained a set of advisors headed by Al Sharpton along with attorneys Mason and Maddox, fresh off a round of racially charged publicity in the Howard Beach incident. As the Post explains:

Within weeks, a suspect emerged — Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., who had been found dead in his apartment three days after the Brawley “attack.”

But Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor at the time, defended his dead friend Crist, offering an alibi for the cop — they were Christmas-shopping together on one of the days in question. And on the three other days of the “kidnapping,” Crist was on patrol, working at his other job at IBM, and installing insulation in an attic.

Brawley’s handlers then claimed — without proof — that Pagones was part of the white mob that kidnapped and raped the girl 33 times.

Celebrities lined up to support Tawana, including Bill Cosby, who posted a $25,000 reward for information on the case; Don King, who promised $100,000 for Brawley’s education; and Spike Lee, who in his 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing,” included a shot of a graffiti message reading, “Tawana told the truth.”

A jury found that Brawley was lying. Crist’s suicide was completely unrelated.

Pagones filed a successful defamation suit against Brawley, Sharpton, Mason and Maddox but Brawley herself has avoided both payment and the public eye. Post reporters recently tracked Brawley down in Virigina, where she was living under different names. A Virgina court ordered the payments of slightly less than $700 per month, garnishments that Brawley can appeal every six months. Under the current order, Brawley would complete her debt to Pagones in around 51 years.

Sharpton had his settlement debt to Pagones paid by supporters, including O.J. Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran. MSNBC host and Obama ally Sharpton is still unrepentant about the Brawley incident and refuses to even say that Brawley was lying, instead claiming in a recent interview: “Whatever happened, you’re dealing with a minor who was missing for four days, so it’s clear that something wrong happened.”