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Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax
From the team of reporters who broke the grand jury expose of the Tawana Brawley hoax comes a brilliant chronicle of the most inflammatory racial episode in recent years--a terrifying, sobering portrait of politics, the media, and an American tinderbox of race, prejudice, and fear.
"On Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, in a quiet Hudson Valley town, neighbors at a graden apartment complex found a teenage black girl curled up inside a garbage bag, her clothes and body smeared with excrement and scrawled racial slurs ---- 'Nigger'.'KKK'.'Bitch.' She couldn't ---- or wouldn't ---- speak, but in scribbled notes, nods, and shrugs indicated that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by white racists, possibly lawmen."
"On Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, in a quiet Hudson Valley town, neighbors at a graden apartment complex found a teenage black girl curled up inside a garbage bag, her clothes and body smeared with excrement and scrawled racial slurs ---- 'Nigger'.'KKK'.'Bitch.' She couldn't ---- or wouldn't ---- speak, but in scribbled notes, nods, and shrugs indicated that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by white racists, possibly lawmen."
- GenresNonfiction
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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April 29, 2026
THE ‘DEFINITIVE’ BOOK ON THIS SENSATIONAL AND CONTROVERSIAL CASE
The Introduction to this 1990 book states, “In November 1987, Tawana Brawley fabricated a tale of abduction and rape by white racists. In succeeding months, millions of people embraced her lie as a paradigm of racism in America, and many later clung to it in the face of overwhelming evidence of a hoax. How could all this have happened? The authors of this book set out to learn the truth about the girl, but the journey took us inevitably into larger realms. This volume is, accordingly far more than a comprehensive account of the Tawana Brawley mystery. It is also a story of simmering racial hatreds, a flawed criminal justice system, a distortion-prone press, and the charlatans who exploited these problems…
“The authors of this book covered the Tawana Brawley story for The New York Times throughout much of 1988. But hundreds of interviews with key figures and many confidential official documents have produced a wealth of additional detail and new insights...With a transformed vision, we have critically reexamined the events, characters, and crosscurrents of the case from its obscure origins to its troubling consequences…. Our investigation, finally, has given us the opportunity to approach the elusive truth about what happened to Tawana Brawley. The whole story may never be known, since the girl and her family have… refused all entreaties to provide a verifiable account. This book sets forth a version of events based on the authors’ own investigation, as well as the material compiled by the New York State grand jury. It is, to the best of our knowledge, what actually happened.”
They report in the first chapter that two residents in the Pavillion Condominiums “[saw a teenaged girl] glanced around furtively, as if to see whether anyone was observing her. She was holding a big green plastic garbage bag…. She spread the bag open and climbed in, pulling it up so that just the top of her head was sticking out…” They called the Sheriff’s Department” (Pg. 11) “the Sheriff’s Department … took photographs of the girl… These showed her partly disrobed, with remnants of dried feces on her upper body and in her hair and racial slurs on her chest and torso… They found the girl’s clothing… On the pink blouse, they found ‘KKK’ and ‘N----R’ written in block letters with a substance like that used on her body. And on the girl’s shoe, they found ‘N-----R’ carved into the instep.” (Pg. 21-22)
They note, “There was no mystery about the meaning of these things. Howard Beach and other episodes of racial violence were fresh in their minds, and it seemed certain that some federal civil rights laws had been violated…. But for all their eagerness, the investigators missed some important clues. The wads from the girl’s ears and nostrils were not recovered from the wastebasket… Nor did anyone think to save flecks of the substance used to write on the girl’s chest and the feces smeared on her body, though samples of both were recovered from the pink blouse.” (Pg. 22)
They state, “Dr. Pena sat… to write her report for the hospital records. Under the heading of diagnosis, she wrote: ‘Possible sexual assault.’ But thinking about it, she had her doubts. She believed that the girl had endured some severe emotional trauma, but there was no sign that she had suffered physical injury. This was striking: how could Tawana Brawley have been abducted, raped, and subjected by rapists to prolonged brutality without having been injured? Perhaps only the girl could answer that, and so far she had said virtually nothing.” (Pg. 51)
They report: “a story---told primarily by Juanita [Tawana’s aunt] began to emerge… About 8:40 p.m., she got off the bus … She started walking toward home, about a mile away… She did not remember how far she got. Suddenly, a dark … car with two men inside drew up. A white man got out… he pulled her by the hair into the back seat and hit her when she started screaming… The next thing she knew she was in a place with three white men in dark clothes. She did not remember if some of the men were bald… She remembered no lights and heard no running water or passing cards. All the men joined in calling her [racial epithets]. She was struck again on the head by the man who had hit her in the car... the men urinated … into Tawana’s mouth. The girl had no recollection of what happened after that, no idea of that happened to her [the next for days]… no idea if anyone had written anything on her and no idea how she ended up at the Pavilion… It was an astounding story: at first an apparently straightforward account… then, from the point of abduction, an increasingly vague sequence of men and woods and horrors… There were not assertions that she had been raped or sodomized. And her story was very different from the one Juanita had told on Sunday. Tawana’s account of when and where she got off the bus was three hours different and one mile distant from the time and place given by her aunt. Tawana said there were three assailants; Juanita had said there were six. And Juanita’s version … included charges of gang rape and sodomy, portrayals of racists smearing feces and writing racial slurs on the girl’s body, and other torments the Tawana herself had not mentioned. Indeed, the girl would recall almost nothing of the assailants, except that one was tall and blonde and had a badge or maybe a holster. She could not recall what had happened to her books, how she had come to be in different clothes, or what had happened to the clothes she was wearing when she vanished. She could not recall being smeared with fecal matter or scrawled with racial slurs. She could not recall where she had been or what had happened to her during almost the entire ninety hours she had been missing. There were nothing but questions and more questions.” (Pg. 73-74)
They state, “a forensic expert … examined ... swabs from her mouth, vagina, and rectum… His initial examination found no semen… but these results were regarded as inconclusive… [He] also examined … the cottonlike wads… It was clear that whoever has stuffed the wads into Tawana’s ears and nostrils had gone to considerable trouble to spare her from infection and the odor of the excrement smeared on her.” (Pg. 151)
Her 17-year-old boyfriend Todd Buxton was working with the state police, and was recorded when he called her… She accused him of striking a deal with the authorities [he was serving a 6-month sentence for assault]… [He asked her] ‘Is it true what they be writing in the paper?’ ‘Well, part of it is.’ ‘That’s what I don’t understand. If they did this to you, why don’t you want to tell?’ ‘Cause I … just remember faces.’ ‘Where in hell was you during those four days?’ ‘I don’t know.’… She was not as closemouthed and she was being portrayed… it made [the authorities] think maybe she DID remember what happened.” (Pg. 155-159)
Investigators spoke with reporters: “They had found ‘practice writing’ on her jeans… The writing was smudged on her pants and on her body, as if scrawled with fingers. They were not ruling out the possibility that she had written the racial slurs on herself… A former neighbor boy… had said under questioning that he had had sexual relations with Tawana when she was twelve. And he remembered seeing Tawana with a bloody now from a beating by her mother. Violence was not uncommon in the Brawley family… When Tawana was arrested for shoplifting a year ago, [her mother’s boyfriend] had gone at her with fists and had had to be restrained.” (Pg. 248-249)
“[Al] Sharpton ridiculed the Times article detailing the alibis of Pagone, Crist, and the other men accused by [the Brawley family’s] advisers… [Sharpton said] that Pagone was a mobster and that Tawana could not hazard a public appearance now because she was in mortal danger, this time from the underworld. The accusation was wild, but coming from Sharpton, not that wild.” (Pg. 282)
During the grand jury hearing, a psychiatrist at Yale University testified: “Tawana Brawley did not appear to be suffering from any neurological or physical disorder… That left two choices: either she had been severely traumatized or else she was faking… Tawana Brawley had been seen crawling into the bag… [His diagnosis?] the girl had been faking the limp and all the other physical symptoms…. Such [false] claims… tend to be sketchy about … details. About all these things, Tawana had been vague… People who make false claims often… want to hide something… And there were usually inconsistencies in the evidence. In Tawana’s case, these were obvious: her jeans had been burned, but not her body; excrement had been smeared on her body, but… cotton wads had been used to protect her nostrils and ears from infection.” (Pg. 344-345) FBI agent Malone “found no pubic hairs of any kind, other than Tawana Brawley’s, on any of the items… There was no evidence … that the girl had been sexually assaulted… But there was abundant evidence that Tawana had spent much of the time she was missing in Apartment 19A. Malone had found fibers from the apartment’s carpet on the girl’s jeans and pink shoe… [He] found more fibers … on a denim jacket left in the washing machine in the apartment---the jacket she had been wearing the night she disappeared…” (Pg. 350-351) They conclude, “[An] FBI agent laid it all out for the grand jury. The conclusion was inescapable. Tawana Brawley had written the racial slurs on herself.” (Pg. 353)
Ultimately, the grand jury concluded, “we conclude that Tawana Brawley was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period. There is no evidence that any sexual assault occurred… there is nothing in regard to Tawana Brawley’s appearance… that is inconsistent with this condition having been self-inflicted.” (Pg. 367)
This book will be ‘must reading’ for anyone seriously studying this case.
The Introduction to this 1990 book states, “In November 1987, Tawana Brawley fabricated a tale of abduction and rape by white racists. In succeeding months, millions of people embraced her lie as a paradigm of racism in America, and many later clung to it in the face of overwhelming evidence of a hoax. How could all this have happened? The authors of this book set out to learn the truth about the girl, but the journey took us inevitably into larger realms. This volume is, accordingly far more than a comprehensive account of the Tawana Brawley mystery. It is also a story of simmering racial hatreds, a flawed criminal justice system, a distortion-prone press, and the charlatans who exploited these problems…
“The authors of this book covered the Tawana Brawley story for The New York Times throughout much of 1988. But hundreds of interviews with key figures and many confidential official documents have produced a wealth of additional detail and new insights...With a transformed vision, we have critically reexamined the events, characters, and crosscurrents of the case from its obscure origins to its troubling consequences…. Our investigation, finally, has given us the opportunity to approach the elusive truth about what happened to Tawana Brawley. The whole story may never be known, since the girl and her family have… refused all entreaties to provide a verifiable account. This book sets forth a version of events based on the authors’ own investigation, as well as the material compiled by the New York State grand jury. It is, to the best of our knowledge, what actually happened.”
They report in the first chapter that two residents in the Pavillion Condominiums “[saw a teenaged girl] glanced around furtively, as if to see whether anyone was observing her. She was holding a big green plastic garbage bag…. She spread the bag open and climbed in, pulling it up so that just the top of her head was sticking out…” They called the Sheriff’s Department” (Pg. 11) “the Sheriff’s Department … took photographs of the girl… These showed her partly disrobed, with remnants of dried feces on her upper body and in her hair and racial slurs on her chest and torso… They found the girl’s clothing… On the pink blouse, they found ‘KKK’ and ‘N----R’ written in block letters with a substance like that used on her body. And on the girl’s shoe, they found ‘N-----R’ carved into the instep.” (Pg. 21-22)
They note, “There was no mystery about the meaning of these things. Howard Beach and other episodes of racial violence were fresh in their minds, and it seemed certain that some federal civil rights laws had been violated…. But for all their eagerness, the investigators missed some important clues. The wads from the girl’s ears and nostrils were not recovered from the wastebasket… Nor did anyone think to save flecks of the substance used to write on the girl’s chest and the feces smeared on her body, though samples of both were recovered from the pink blouse.” (Pg. 22)
They state, “Dr. Pena sat… to write her report for the hospital records. Under the heading of diagnosis, she wrote: ‘Possible sexual assault.’ But thinking about it, she had her doubts. She believed that the girl had endured some severe emotional trauma, but there was no sign that she had suffered physical injury. This was striking: how could Tawana Brawley have been abducted, raped, and subjected by rapists to prolonged brutality without having been injured? Perhaps only the girl could answer that, and so far she had said virtually nothing.” (Pg. 51)
They report: “a story---told primarily by Juanita [Tawana’s aunt] began to emerge… About 8:40 p.m., she got off the bus … She started walking toward home, about a mile away… She did not remember how far she got. Suddenly, a dark … car with two men inside drew up. A white man got out… he pulled her by the hair into the back seat and hit her when she started screaming… The next thing she knew she was in a place with three white men in dark clothes. She did not remember if some of the men were bald… She remembered no lights and heard no running water or passing cards. All the men joined in calling her [racial epithets]. She was struck again on the head by the man who had hit her in the car... the men urinated … into Tawana’s mouth. The girl had no recollection of what happened after that, no idea of that happened to her [the next for days]… no idea if anyone had written anything on her and no idea how she ended up at the Pavilion… It was an astounding story: at first an apparently straightforward account… then, from the point of abduction, an increasingly vague sequence of men and woods and horrors… There were not assertions that she had been raped or sodomized. And her story was very different from the one Juanita had told on Sunday. Tawana’s account of when and where she got off the bus was three hours different and one mile distant from the time and place given by her aunt. Tawana said there were three assailants; Juanita had said there were six. And Juanita’s version … included charges of gang rape and sodomy, portrayals of racists smearing feces and writing racial slurs on the girl’s body, and other torments the Tawana herself had not mentioned. Indeed, the girl would recall almost nothing of the assailants, except that one was tall and blonde and had a badge or maybe a holster. She could not recall what had happened to her books, how she had come to be in different clothes, or what had happened to the clothes she was wearing when she vanished. She could not recall being smeared with fecal matter or scrawled with racial slurs. She could not recall where she had been or what had happened to her during almost the entire ninety hours she had been missing. There were nothing but questions and more questions.” (Pg. 73-74)
They state, “a forensic expert … examined ... swabs from her mouth, vagina, and rectum… His initial examination found no semen… but these results were regarded as inconclusive… [He] also examined … the cottonlike wads… It was clear that whoever has stuffed the wads into Tawana’s ears and nostrils had gone to considerable trouble to spare her from infection and the odor of the excrement smeared on her.” (Pg. 151)
Her 17-year-old boyfriend Todd Buxton was working with the state police, and was recorded when he called her… She accused him of striking a deal with the authorities [he was serving a 6-month sentence for assault]… [He asked her] ‘Is it true what they be writing in the paper?’ ‘Well, part of it is.’ ‘That’s what I don’t understand. If they did this to you, why don’t you want to tell?’ ‘Cause I … just remember faces.’ ‘Where in hell was you during those four days?’ ‘I don’t know.’… She was not as closemouthed and she was being portrayed… it made [the authorities] think maybe she DID remember what happened.” (Pg. 155-159)
Investigators spoke with reporters: “They had found ‘practice writing’ on her jeans… The writing was smudged on her pants and on her body, as if scrawled with fingers. They were not ruling out the possibility that she had written the racial slurs on herself… A former neighbor boy… had said under questioning that he had had sexual relations with Tawana when she was twelve. And he remembered seeing Tawana with a bloody now from a beating by her mother. Violence was not uncommon in the Brawley family… When Tawana was arrested for shoplifting a year ago, [her mother’s boyfriend] had gone at her with fists and had had to be restrained.” (Pg. 248-249)
“[Al] Sharpton ridiculed the Times article detailing the alibis of Pagone, Crist, and the other men accused by [the Brawley family’s] advisers… [Sharpton said] that Pagone was a mobster and that Tawana could not hazard a public appearance now because she was in mortal danger, this time from the underworld. The accusation was wild, but coming from Sharpton, not that wild.” (Pg. 282)
During the grand jury hearing, a psychiatrist at Yale University testified: “Tawana Brawley did not appear to be suffering from any neurological or physical disorder… That left two choices: either she had been severely traumatized or else she was faking… Tawana Brawley had been seen crawling into the bag… [His diagnosis?] the girl had been faking the limp and all the other physical symptoms…. Such [false] claims… tend to be sketchy about … details. About all these things, Tawana had been vague… People who make false claims often… want to hide something… And there were usually inconsistencies in the evidence. In Tawana’s case, these were obvious: her jeans had been burned, but not her body; excrement had been smeared on her body, but… cotton wads had been used to protect her nostrils and ears from infection.” (Pg. 344-345) FBI agent Malone “found no pubic hairs of any kind, other than Tawana Brawley’s, on any of the items… There was no evidence … that the girl had been sexually assaulted… But there was abundant evidence that Tawana had spent much of the time she was missing in Apartment 19A. Malone had found fibers from the apartment’s carpet on the girl’s jeans and pink shoe… [He] found more fibers … on a denim jacket left in the washing machine in the apartment---the jacket she had been wearing the night she disappeared…” (Pg. 350-351) They conclude, “[An] FBI agent laid it all out for the grand jury. The conclusion was inescapable. Tawana Brawley had written the racial slurs on herself.” (Pg. 353)
Ultimately, the grand jury concluded, “we conclude that Tawana Brawley was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period. There is no evidence that any sexual assault occurred… there is nothing in regard to Tawana Brawley’s appearance… that is inconsistent with this condition having been self-inflicted.” (Pg. 367)
This book will be ‘must reading’ for anyone seriously studying this case.
January 19, 2014
What a mess. I actually feel sorry for Tawana. She had no role models in her life. Sad, sad, sad. Her aunt Juanita tried, some, but everybody took advantage of Tawana, to suit their own purposes. It would be nice if she could now own up to her--albeit 15-year-old's -- part in it, and apologize. Perhaps she could, at long last, set the good example for all those people who knew better, but did wrong anyway, and ask for forgiveness.
September 24, 2020
A fairly crisp and deft reporting of the Tawana Brawley matter. I’m a bit suspicious about the framing device, a group of African-Americans meet routinely at a diner in Hash back-and-forth on the matter. It just seems a way to close the book with a black voice Claiming he didn’t believe her. I find that choice by the authors more than a bit troubling.
August 20, 2008
A must read for anyone who doubts my assertion that al sharpton, jessie jackson, spike lee, louis farrakhan, etc. etc. are true racial hate-mongers and twisted bigots in America and have been for 20 or more years. These are the folks holding back black Americans as much or more than any failed policies or hateful racism on the part of white America. The Tawana Brawley hoax was just one of so many incidents that these guys have used to create hate between the races. Guess who was screaming loudest in New Orleans a couple years ago? All of the above named losers. Yes, our government could have reacted better, but NO, Bush did not create a hurricane and he did not blow up levees and he did not tell people to stay put and he does not hate people for being African American. Hate emanates from the losers listed in the first sentence above.
January 27, 2015
Finally the truth!
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