The strange rise of a hatemonger - the growing power of Al Sharpton in NewYork City politics

National Review, March 20, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

His greatest infamy came in 1987, with the Tawana Brawley hoax. As the journalist Nat Hentoff has put it, this is Sharpton's "Chappaquiddick." To recall the horrid affair: A girl named Tawana Brawley, after staying away from home for several days, smeared herself with dog feces, scrawled racial epithets on her body, and hopped into a garbage bag. Then she claimed that six white men, including a police officer, had raped and otherwise tormented her. All of America sat up in alarm. Bill Cosby, who was at the height of his fame and popularity, offered a large monetary award for information leading to arrests. And Al Sharpton, of course, was on the spot. Acting as the Brawley family's adviser, he urged them not to cooperate with the authorities, including the state attorney general, Robert Abrams. To cooperate with Abrams, he said, would be "to sit down with Mr. Hitler." A Sharpton sidekick, Alton Maddox, added, "Robert Abrams, you are no longer going to masturbate looking at Tawana Brawley's picture."

One of those whom Sharpton and his partners accused was an assistant district attorney, Steven Pagones, who was, needless to say, innocent (the crime never took place). After he was cleared, he held a press conference, which Sharpton, in his theatrical fashion, attempted to crash. "Your accuser has arrived!" he bellowed. Sharpton had said before, "We stated openly that Steven Pagones did it. If we're lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it. Sue us- sue us right now." Oddly enough, Pagones did. He spent a decade of his life pursuing a defamation case against Sharpton and his accomplices, finally winning that case one glorious, cleansing day in July of 1998. His life had been a hell-of death threats, illnesses, and assorted other agonies. He said to an interviewer in 1997, "I know that Sharpton doesn't care how I feel. [But] I will follow him and make sure he pays up as long as I live. Wherever he goes, he'll find me waiting for him." Sharpton now owes Pagones $65,000 in damages, money that the victim will probably never see.At the heart of any case against Sharpton-and against the notion of a New Sharpton-is his persecution of Steven Pagones. It has been, to use the word for which there is no substitute, evil. He has never apologized for his deeds, and nothing piques him more than to be reminded of them. "If I saved the Pope's life," he has sniped, "the media would ask me about Brawley." In soft moments, he has come close to apologizing ("I have regrets"). In harder ones, he is angrily defiant ("Never, ever!"). Liberal journalists-white-patiently explain that, for a black leader, an apology is a complicated matter: a question of politics and tactics, not of right and wrong. As Sharpton himself has said, to apologize would be "all about submission." White folk "are asking me to grovel. They want black children to say that they forced a black man coming out of the hardcore ghetto to his knees." Jesse Jackson gained nothing by apologizing for his "Hymietown" remark, so why should he? Only last year, Sharpton said of his role in the Brawley case, "If I had to do it again, I'd do it in the same way."