When: December 14, 1987

The accusations: Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old teenager from Upstate New York, accuses six white law enforcement officers, one of whom she says was wearing a police badge, of abducting her, sexually assaulting her for four days, scrawling "nigger" and "KKK" across her toso, and leaving her in a plastic garbage bag smeared with feces. Two months later, Reverend Al Sharpton gets involved. Bill Cosby puts up a $25,000 reward for information leading to the truth. Mike Tyson gives her a watch. And New York is horrified. When her name first appears in the New York Times, she shares billing with Alphonso Smith, a black man from Peekskill who has accused cops of beating him and black and Latino inmates of a Westchester County jail. History has recorded nothing further of Mr. Smith or the inmates, but Tawana Brawley has been with us ever since.

Hoax? Tawana Brawley refuses to testify in front of a grand jury. The jury finds no evidence to support charges and suggests that she might be responsible for the condition in which she was found. What happened is still not clear.

The victims:
Sharpton repeatedly identifies prosecutor Steven Pagones as one of Brawley's attackers. Sharpton later pays Pagones $65,000 for defamation damages.

"It was a great harm," says Les Payne, the Newsday editor who broke the story of Tawana's admitting to a boyfriend that it didn't happen. "Grandmothers in Bed-Stuy up from the South, who know about the rape of black women, giving up their rent money in the belief that she was raped when in fact she was not raped."