A quarter-century after her name made national headlines and became infamous, Tawana Brawley is finally paying for making a false rape charge against a former New York prosecutor.
Paying $627 per month, to be exact.
The New York Post reports that last week a judge in Virginia, where Brawley now lives under various assumed names and works as a nurse, ordered $3,764.61 garnished from six months' worth of Brawley's wages and paid to Steven Pagones.
But that's far from the end of it, as the paper reports Brawley owes $431,000 more.
The payments are the latest chapter in a saga that began in November 1987, when Brawley, then 15 years old, was found in a trash bag with racial slurs written on her in feces. She told police that six white men had abducted, brutalized, and raped her for four days. Her handlers, including a relatively unknown minister named Al Sharpton, accused Pagones, then a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York, of being one of Brawley's attackers. A grand jury concluded that Brawleys story was a hoax the following year.
In 1998 Pagones won a defamation suit from Sharpton and two of Brawley's other advisers, who were ordered to pay over $350,000 in damages. Brawley was ordered to pay $190,000 at 9 percent annual interest -- hence the $431,000 figure.
For his part, Pagones tells The Post that he'll forgive the rest of the debt if Brawley admits that she falsely accused him.
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