One Police Plaza

The Max for Jussie?

February 25, 2018

Well, was that the Rev. Al Sharpton calling out actor Jussie Smollett, saying Smollett should face “accountability to the maximum” if the “Empire” star faked a bias attack in Chicago last month?

“Whoever is wrong should pay the maximum,” said Sharpton after lunching with Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris at the Harlem landmark, Sylvia’s. The California Senator had called the so-called attack on Smollett a “modern day lynching.”

“If Smollett is wrong, he ought to face accountability to the maximum,” Sharpton said. Chicago authorities have charged Smollett with staging an attack that Smollett cast as a racist and homophobic hate crime.

Was the Rev. being facetious, or did he think people had forgotten that he himself created a gigantic racial hoax more than 30 years ago: the rape and sodomization by four white men of Tawana Brawley, who is African-American?

In a background piece on false claims of racial attacks, the NY Times did not include the Brawley case or Sharpton’s role, which catapulted him from smalltime racial hustler to civil rights superstar.

If you doubt that last description, you didn’t attend the funeral of Eric Garner, where Sharpton’s arrival in a black town car outside Brooklyn’s Bethel Baptist Church was greeted as something akin to the second coming.

For anyone who might have forgotten: Brawley was a Dutchess County, 15-year-old black girl who went missing for four days in 1987. She was found inside a plastic bag, feces in her hair, the word “nigger” carved on her stomach, the initials KKK carved on her chest. She claimed a group of white men — one of whom she recognized as a police officer — had raped and sodomized her. A grand jury report under the auspices of the state’s Attorney General’s Office found Brawley’s story to be a lie.

Sharpton specifically accused Assistant Dutchess County Attorney Steven Pagones as one Brawley’s attackers. Pagones won a $175,000 libel suit against Sharpton and two of Brawley’s attorneys, both of whom were subsequently disbarred. For years, Sharpton refused to pay his share. Nor did he ever apologize to Pagones. Unless I missed it, the furthest he has gone in apology or repentance was stating: “A lot of the rhetoric, including mine, went too far.”

In Chicago, Smollett claimed that after leaving a Subway restaurant around 2AM on Jan. 29, he was attacked by two men, who he claimed were Trump supporters and who he claimed slipped a noose around his neck. He said they had used racial and homophobic slurs.

Chicago police called Smollett’s claim “pure fiction” and a publicity stunt to generate a higher salary from “Empire.” Last Thursday Smollett turned himself in on several charges, including a felony count of having filed a false police report.