A troubled young woman whom the Rev. Al Sharpton championed as a victim of a horrific, racially motivated sexual assault now says she fabricated the incident — despite the fact that all of her alleged attackers pleaded guilty and are serving jail time.
Megan Williams, who is black, wasn’t kidnapped and tortured in a West Virginia trailer at the hands of white attackers — but lied because she wanted to get back at a boyfriend who’d beaten her, her lawyer, Byron Potts, said.
“She told me the only thing not self-inflicted were the bruises on her face,” he said at a news conference.
“She is recanting the entire incident. She says it did not happen, and she’s scared.”
When her allegations went public in 2007, Sharpton rallied to her side and pressed authorities to indict the accused attackers for hate crimes, even as local NAACP leaders urged restraint.
“Our involvement surrounded a call for hate-crime investigations and we did not know the truths or nontruths of the investigation,” Sharpton said in a statement yesterday.
Two years ago, a then-20-year-old Williams told Logan County, W.Va., authorities that seven white people held her captive in a trailer where she was stabbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, scalded and taunted with racially charged epithets.
Former Logan County prosecutor Brian Abraham still insists the suspects are guilty.
Abraham said Williams — who had dated one of her attackers — now has no credibility, although he continues to believe she was held against her will and sexually assaulted. “If she’s going to say that she made it all up, that’s absurd,” he said. “This looks like another attempt to generate more publicity.”
All seven of the accused attackers pleaded guilty to variety of charges, and six received lengthy prison sentences. Williams, who is developmentally challenged, said she was pressured by her adopted mother to make the false allegation and the two had collected $70,000 in donations, including $1,000 from Sharpton.
Sharpton — who now wants a new investigation — already has a record tarnished by his drum-beating for Tawana Brawley’s discredited 1987 claim that she was gang-raped by white cops. Authorities believe Brawley made up the story to avoid punishment for staying out late.