UPROAR: Brawley joins Al Sharpton at an Atlanta rally in June 1988 — four months before her rape claim was exposed as a lie. (AP)
Tawana Brawley as a teen in Dutchess County.
Her silence is deafening.
Twenty-five years after the spotlight first glared on Tawana Brawley — a black woman who as a teen claimed she was raped by a gang of white men, smeared with feces and stuffed in a garbage bag — she’s desperately struggling to stay hidden from public view.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone about that,” Brawley, 40, said recently after The Post found her in Hopewell, Va., where she lives in a neatly kept brick apartment complex with signs warning of video surveillance cameras.
By all appearances, her life — so chaotic a quarter-century ago — now seems normal.
Brawley, using aliases such as Thompson and Gutierrez, now has a young daughter, a neighbor says, and works as a licensed practical nurse at The Laurels of Bon Air in Richmond, where co-workers were clueless about her past.
“Are you serious? We don’t know her by that name. Isn’t that a trip?” squealed one staffer, who called Brawley, known to staff as Tawana Gutierrez, “a good worker.”
On a recent Friday, Brawley, noticeably heavier and dressed in pink scrubs, emerged from her apartment at about 6:30 a.m. with a small child and a man wearing red hospital scrubs.
The two left in separate cars — Brawley in a Chrysler Sebring and the man and child in a Ford Taurus.
She arrived at work in Richmond about 30 minutes later, and the man pulled in minutes afterward.
Hopewell — where Brawley has lived for at least a year, according to a neighbor — has the highest rate of violent crime per capita of any city or town in Virginia, local cops say. Plagued by drugs and guns, it had five murders in the last three weeks. Jittery residents call police at even the slightest suspicion.
“You break wind here and they call us,” one veteran officer said.
State records show “Tawana V. Gutierrez” and “Tawana V. Thompson” have held the same nursing license since 2006. The Virginia Board of Nursing confirmed issuing it to a “Tawana Vacenia Thompson Gutierrez.”
Brawley maintains a PO box in Claremont, Va., under the name Gutierrez, according to sources.
That town is a 45-minute drive from Hopewell and is the residence of her stepdad, Ralph King, who spent seven years in prison in the 1970s for killing his first wife.
Locals in the rural mill town described King, who lives in a ramshackle house near the end of a dead-end street where dogs run wild, as a nasty man and said they hadn’t seen Tawana in years.
“He’s real mean,” one man said.
King declined to be interviewed.
A quarter-century ago, Brawley, then just 15, told a story incredible for its sheer brutality.
After she went missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County, Brawley was found in a trash bag on Nov. 28, 1987, dazed, covered in feces and with the words “n—-r” and “b—h” scrawled in charcoal on her body and “KKK” carved into her shoe.
Initially, Brawley said little, simply nodding or writing notes when investigators questioned her and revealing that she had been abducted by two white men in a dark car who drove her to the woods, where four other white men were waiting.
Details were in short supply. Tawana couldn’t offer names or even a description of the attackers who ravaged her for four days.
She said her memory went blank from the time she was attacked until she was discovered. Though she did recall that one of her attackers had blond hair, a holster — and a badge.
The shocking allegations polarized New York City — already a powder keg of racial tension a year after a white mob attacked three black teens in Howard Beach, Queens, killing one.
The case attracted attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, and the then-little-known Rev. Al Sharpton, who used it to catapult to the national stage.
Less than a week after Brawley was discovered, Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., 28, was found dead in his apartment.
Soon, Brawley’s advisers would name Crist as a suspect in the rape. And when Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones offered an alibi for Crist, Pagones suddenly found himself also accused.
Sharpton and Brawley’s lawyers claimed — without proof — that Pagones kidnapped, abused and raped Brawley on 33 occasions.
They also fingered state trooper Scott Patterson, a friend of Crist and Pagones, who found Crist’s body.
Brawley became a cause célèbre. Bill Cosby posted a $25,000 reward for information on the case; Don King promised $100,000 for Brawley’s education; and boxer Mike Tyson gave her a $30,000 watch to ease her pain.
But a grand jury found in 1988 that Brawley was never raped and the whole incredible case was all a hoax.
The panel, which heard from 180 witnesses over its seven-month investigation, found evidence that Brawley ran away from home and was hiding out in the vacant apartment from which her parents were just evicted and that she spun her yarn to avoid being punished for staying out late and missing school.
Many believe Brawley feared her stepdad King’s wrath and needed an alibi for her absence.
The hateful words scrawled on Brawley’s body were upside down — likely written by Brawley herself, and traces of the charcoal-like material were found under her fingernails, the grand jury found.
Brawley showed no signs of genital trauma or exposure. No semen was found. The feces on her body was traced to her neighbor’s dog. One witness said Brawley was seen climbing into the garbage bag.
The grand jury found that Crist committed suicide because he was upset after breaking up with his girlfriend and over his failure to pass a state police exam. His death, the panel found, “had no connection with any incident involving Tawana Brawley.”
“It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside down with such false claims,” state Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman wrote at the time.
These days, Pagones, still a lawyer but now a principal at a New York-based private-investigation firm, is trying to forget the name Tawana Brawley. But he can’t.
“It’ll come up randomly. It’ll come up when something happens with Sharpton,” he told The Post.
In 1998, Pagones won a defamation lawsuit against Sharpton, Brawley and her lawyers. Maddox was found liable for $97,000, Mason for $188,000, and Sharpton was ordered to pony up $66,000, money that was paid by celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran and other benefactors.
Brawley was ordered to fork over $190,000 at 9 percent annual interest. None of that has been paid, which brings her total bill to $429,000.
Pagones, who served as Dutchess County assistant district attorney until 1990, continues to search for her.
“Through her silence, she’s as guilty of libel as Maddox, Mason and Sharpton,” he said. “The only way to hold her accountable — at least at this stage — is financially.”
Pagones contends that after all these years, Brawley still should publicly state he did not rape her.
“I absolutely think she was manipulated by Mason, Maddox and Sharpton,” he said. “But even if at the time she was being victimized by them, 25 years have gone by. At any time she could have told someone, ‘I want to tell the truth.’ To me, she’s no longer a victim.”
The case haunts him but no longer dominates his life as it once did.
“I had to sit down with my daughters and explain to them that this was a case where someone made reckless allegations,” he said. “It didn’t ruin me, but it certainly had a huge impact on every aspect of my life.
“It’s not about the money, but the money is the only way I can hold her accountable.”
Pagones blames Sharpton more than anyone else for his troubles.
“I don’t ever expect him to say he’s sorry, but he should at least come clean and admit that, after the trial, that now he knows Steven Pagones had nothing to do with Tawana Brawley,” Pagones said.
Pagones is correct: To this day, Sharpton remains unapologetic.
“Does Donald Trump owe the Central Park Five an apology? He advocated in the Central Park case what he believed, I advocated what I believe,” he told The Post, referring to Trump’s full-page ads demanding the death penalty for five teens accused — and eventually exonerated — of raping a jogger in Central Park.
Pagones remains undaunted.
“We’ll get her. It’s just a question of time.”
Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton, Gary Buiso and Georgett Roberts