If lying, take her to task

The first e-mail message invoking Tawana Brawley arrived in my inbox at 11:36 on the Monday morning after the Duke lacrosse story first broke.

In the two-and-a-half weeks that followed, the messages citing Brawley ebbed and flowed depending on the news of the day -- until Monday, when DNA showed that none of the lacrosse team members matched the samples taken from the woman who alleged rape during a team party.

Suddenly Tawana Brawley became a poster child.

For those of you who don't remember Brawley, she was the 15-year-old black girl from New York who was found in November 1987 covered in feces, with racial epithets written on her body in charcoal. She claimed she had been raped by six white police officers. Rallies and marches followed. The Rev. Al Sharpton got involved.

But soon after, the girl's story unraveled. When the case was brought before a grand jury, the charges were deemed baseless. The police officers later sued. Although Brawley continued to maintain her tale, even years later, it is widely accepted to have been a hoax.

I hope that is not, as so many readers have suggested, what we have in Durham today.

It's not that I want the lacrosse players to be guilty of rape. I don't. I don't want anyone to have been raped. I don't want anyone to have been wrongly accused of a terrible crime.

But I really don't want this woman to have made up these rape allegations. False accusations, in any case, are morally abominable.

In this particular case, false accusations would have sullied the reputations of dozens of players, ruined a team's season and poisoned town-gown and race relations in Durham.

There is no punishment on the books sufficient for a woman who would falsely accuse even the biggest jerks on campus of gang rape. If that is what happened, the accuser must be named and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Because if a woman falsely accuses a man, or in this case, a group of men, of raping her, her treachery reaches beyond the confines of her own case and the wreckage it has caused there.

It reaches beyond, into the lives of every woman who has ever truly been the victim of a rape. It reaches into the lives of every woman yet to be a victim.

There is no one who abhors a false accusation more than a true victim of this crime.

I know because I was raped 21 years ago, on my 20th birthday. Twenty years ago this week, in fact.

I never turned the man in, never reported the rape, never even told family or friends until many years later. Not because I feared the police. Or the prosecutors. Or my rapist.

I feared the disbelief.

In the end, that is what Tawana Brawley sowed in the racial tinderbox of New York state in the 1980s: disbelief and distrust and, out of that, animosity.

With her discredited tale, she undermined years of public education about rape as an expression of power and violence, not of sexual desire.

With her discredited tale, she spit in the faces of all true rape victims who find the courage to come forward and challenge those who do not want to believe.