Tawana Brawley

EVER SINCE self-defacing teen Tawana Brawley smeared feces all over herself, scrawled "KKK" and "nigger" on her skin, climbed into a trash bag and blamed it on racist cops, America has been victimized by publicity-seekers so desperate for attention that they fake the hate by any means necessary. Brawley (now calling herself Maryam Muhammad) is grown up. But her psychologically stunted heirs continue to soak up public sympathy and squander police resources. Recent attention has focused on the pathetic case of Audrey Seiler, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin who reportedly faked her own abduction and sent 150 cops on an intensive manhunt.

Show me, a philosopher once said, how a society treats its children, and I will tell you what kind of society it is. If that is so, then we must ask ourselves what kind of society permits thousands of teen-age American girls to remain at physical and sexual risk. These are among the vulnerable young females you see wandering the streets of big cities, alone and in pairs, late at night. They are easy prey for all the predators, especially drug dealers and pimps. The social workers who attempt to reunite these young runaway women with their families consistently say they discover one overwhelming obstacle: fear.

Tawana Brawley emerged from hiding yesterday and insisted, "I am not a liar and I am not crazy," but failed to provide any evidence to support her claims of abduction and sexual assault. In her first statement since the leak of grand jury material that labeled her story a fraud, Brawley said: "I simply just want justice, and then I want to be left alone. " She spoke at a packed news conference in Newark where her advisers had promised she would "tell her story" and "answer questions.

When I read that the Tawana Brawley mess is still with us, thanks to a $170 million defamation suit brought by one of the men her lawyers claimed raped her, I didn't want to believe it. Hours later, standing outside a locked store - my face pressed against the glass as three saleswomen ignored me - I didn't want to believe it, either. Both times, I believed it. Because that's the way things are. Merely annoying experiences, like mine at the store, can and do happen to everyone.

Flickering decade-old video images of the Rev. Al Sharpton accusing a local prosecutor of participating in the alleged rape and abduction of teenager Tawana Brawley came back to raise questions for the civil rights activist yesterday. The tapes, gleaned from talk shows, were played as Sharpton sat in the witness stand, defending himself in a lawsuit that accuses him of recklessly defaming prosecutor Steven Pagones during the Brawley controversy, which raged for more than a year and exposed deep racial divisions in the nation.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, adviser to Tawana Brawley, yesterday vowed mass demonstrations to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. "We intend to disrupt Gov. Cuomo's attendance of the National Democratic Convention because of the lack of justice for her and the lack of equal protection under the law for blacks," he said. A spokesman for Cuomo's office said "the governor respects everyone's constitutional right to assemble peacefully, and to speak freely. "

The Tawana Brawley investigation is doomed to fail, barring a last-minute change of heart from the silent teen and her family, Attorney General Robert Abrams told the New York Daily News last night. "It has become abundantly clear that without Tawana Brawley and members of her family coming forward to provide information about what precisely happened during those four days, this investigation is not going to succeed," Abrams said. In his strongest statement yet on the case, the state's highest law enforcement officer declared: "We are not going to get information from the people who know the most here.

I've been following an unusual story that came to light approximately three months ago in New York state. The case involves Tawana Brawley, an attractive and articulate 16-year-old black girl, who is an active cheerleader and athlete. Tawana, who had been missing for four days, was found stuffed in a garbage bag, half naked and smeared with feces, with KKK scrawled on her breasts and nigger across her stomach. Details in the case were so murky I decided to watch the story as it developed.

The Rev. Al Sharpton brought his entourage to a West Philadelphia nightclub yesterday to rally support for Tawana Brawley and MOVE, contending both were victims of a racist legal system, and threatening "civil disobedience and plenty of agitation" unless city officials are jailed for their roles in the MOVE bombing. In a rambling, 40-minute news conference at the High Rollers Lounge, 59th and Market Streets, Sharpton and others blasted black leaders ranging from Coretta Scott King to Councilman Lucien Blackwell and attacked Philadelphia's black churches.

Tawana Brawley, the black teenager accused by a New York state grand jury of fabricating a story about being raped and smeared with excrement by a group of white men nearly a year ago, made a brief appearance yesterday at a rally in West Philadelphia. During a 16-second talk to about 80 people, Brawley, 16, who recently moved to Virginia Beach, Va., from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., thanked them for their support, gave her support for "the MOVE people" and urged all black people to "stick together.

EVER SINCE self-defacing teen Tawana Brawley smeared feces all over herself, scrawled "KKK" and "nigger" on her skin, climbed into a trash bag and blamed it on racist cops, America has been victimized by publicity-seekers so desperate for attention that they fake the hate by any means necessary. Brawley (now calling herself Maryam Muhammad) is grown up. But her psychologically stunted heirs continue to soak up public sympathy and squander police resources. Recent attention has focused on the pathetic case of Audrey Seiler, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin who reportedly faked her own abduction and sent 150 cops on an intensive manhunt.

Maybe his poor finish in South Carolina will finally end the Rev. Al Sharpton's lonesome battle to wrest the title of head Negro from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Better to retire the position. African Americans don't need a 21st-century version of Booker T. Washington to talk to white folks on their behalf. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently and vigorously stated the case against racism that he was typically viewed as black America's official spokesman. But even if King thought for a moment that he actually spoke for all African Americans, there were more than a few contrarians like Malcolm X to scoot him back to reality.

The Rev. Al Sharpton who appears on television these days is very different from his media image of the past. The transformation was never more clear than on the evening of Dec. 6. Standing in front of NBC cameras, in a conservative blue suit and tie with his trademark slicked-back hair, Sharpton welcomed viewers to Saturday Night Live. His appearance on the comedy show served to highlight, if not a new warm and cuddly persona, at least an affable and much less strident Sharpton.

A TERRIBLE racial incident took place at Trent Lott's alma mater last month. But you won't hear about it from Dan Rather or Time magazine or the Washington Post or the NAACP. That's because what happened at the University of Mississippi on Nov. 6 has all the markings of a fake hate crime: An apparent racial hoax committed by black students against black students, but blamed on whites - until the suspects were nabbed. Three black freshmen were accused by the college of scrawling racist graffiti on the doors of two other black students in a residence hall on the Oxford campus.

It has been kind of a dry political season here in New York City. Along with many others, I was looking forward to the Rev. Al Sharpton's release from prison Aug. 17. The emergence of Sharpton, sentenced to 90 days for trespassing during a protest of the Navy's six decades of using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a target for bombing practice, and his reentry into city politics was much anticipated. Given the long line of activists for social change who have been humbled, transformed and deeply enlightened by the experience of imprisonment, a rite of passage, I was eager to see what positive changes Reverend Al's incarceration might have wrought.

A funny thing happened to the Rev. Al Sharpton on his path to degradation. Suddenly, he made a turn that put him on a higher road. Indeed, his altered course placed him in such a lofty position that he owns what can only be called an astonishing measure of respectability. Despite more than a dozen years of race-baiting, hate-mongering and nearly boundless irreverence, the Harlem activist has somehow positioned himself to become a political power broker. Despite his bulk, he has proved to be surprisingly nimble on his feet.

He sat at the end of the dais, waiting patiently for his turn. When he first started making waves in the 1980s, it would have been very hard to get the Rev. Al Sharpton to do either - wait or be patient - unless he was stopping rush hour traffic with an angry street protest. But times - and Sharpton - may have changed. It's more than the whisps of gray hair that now grace his signature brown pompadour, or the extra pounds the reverend packs into his three-piece pinstriped suits.

He spoke of racial profiling, and he spoke of police brutality, but mostly the Rev. Al Sharpton - the flamboyant and increasingly influential civil-rights leader - talked about the need for successful African Americans to remember from whence they came, and who helped get them there. "When I drove by a hotel on Broad Street, I turned to my friend and said that's the place where they discovered Legionnaires' disease," Sharpton told more than 1,000 lawyers gathered at the Merriam Theater for the opening ceremony of the 74th annual convention of the National Bar Association, the nation's oldest African American lawyers group.

The Rev. Al Sharpton's public makeover continues. The feisty, often inflammatory New York civil rights activist, who toned down the rhetoric to broaden his appeal in the 1997 New York City mayoral Democratic primary, offered up an inspired but relatively nonconfrontational pitch to Penn students yesterday to further the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream for social justice and equity. A University of Pennsylvania board of students and faculty had tapped Sharpton to deliver this year's keynote address as part of a six-week flurry of events to commemorate Dr. King and his legacy.

A day after a jury ordered him to pay $65,000 for falsely accusing a former prosecutor of kidnapping and rape in the decade-old Tawana Brawley controversy, the Rev. Al Sharpton defiantly predicted yesterday that his political career would thrive despite efforts to silence him. "The damage award and the remarks by the jury were a devastating blow to the stop-Sharpton movement," Sharpton declared in a booming voice during a crowded news conference at...