’87 smear victim is looking to collect
- Start watching your pennies, Tawana.
Twenty-five years after a teenage Tawana Brawley falsely dragged his name through the mud as a gang-raping, kidnapping racist, it’s payback time for Steven Pagones, a former Dutchess County prosecutor whom she still owes $429,000, including interest, on a 1998 defamation judgment.
“In all these years, she’s never told the truth about this hoax or paid me a cent,” he said yesterday.
“Now I’m going to seek anything I’m entitled to under the law,” Pagones said in response to a Sunday Post exclusive that revealed Brawley is working under a new name, Tawana Gutierrez, as a licensed practical nurse in a Richmond, Va., nursing home.
J.C. Rice
CAN'T HIDE: Former prosecutor Steven Pagones is owed a $429,000 defamation payout by Tawana Brawley, whom The Post found lying low in Virginia.
Wilbur Funches Jr.
Former prosecutor Steven Pagones
“I’m going to serve papers seeking to garnish her wages within the next couple of weeks,” he said. “This is all about accountability.”
That garnishment could well cost Brawley, a single mom of a grade-school-age daughter, up to a couple of hundred dollars a week.
Licensed practical nurses in the Richmond area earn an average of around $700 a week after tax, and under Virginia law, creditors with court orders can garnish up to 25 percent, which would translate to a loss of $175 a week.
“Every paycheck, she’ll think about what she did to me,” Pagones said.
Brawley was only 15 years old in 1987 when, after going missing for four days, she was found curled up in a garbage bag near her home in Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County. She was smeared in feces, and the words “n----r”and “b---h” were scrawled on her in charcoal, with “KKK” carved into her shoe.
Brawley, who is black, claimed she was abducted and gang raped repeatedly by six white men, one of whom she said wore a badge.
A week after her “abduction,” Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., 28, committed suicide over a break-up with his girlfriend and his flunking of a state police exam.
The Rev. Al Sharpton seized on the suicide as “proof” Crist was one of Brawley’s rapists. When Pagones offered an alibi for Crist, Sharpton — with Brawley lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason — called Pagones guilty, too.
As Brawley stood silent, Pagones, Crist and Scott Patterson, a state trooper who found Crist’s body, were painted as racist brutes — until the following year, when a state grand jury found she had made the whole thing up.
It took until 1998 for Pagones to get some satisfaction in the civil courts. A Dutchess County judge issued a $185,000 defamation judgment against Brawley, but she had vanished by then. With interest, her debt is now $429,000.
Sharpton paid his $66,000 judgment to Pagones, with help from OJ Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran and others. Maddox has forked over his own bill of $97,000, and Mason, now disbarred and a Baptist minister, is getting his wages garnished for his $188,000 bill.
Pagones hadn’t been actively seeking Brawley out, he said, but now that he knows where she is, he is eager to hold her accountable.
Brawley has declined to speak to The Post.
“I’m not looking for an apology, and I’m really not looking for money,” Pagones said. “If at any point she wants to tell the truth about what happened, I’m always willing to talk.”
All of Brawley’s assets are at risk, said Manhattan attorney Suzanne Kimberly Bracker, who is not connected to the case.
“He can take her car, her wages, her tax refund, too. She won’t be able to escape this,” she said.
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