Another lesbian stages a fake hate crime

There are two main facts in the below story from the Daily Mail, one a perennial, the other a rarity. The perennial is that a favored minority, in this case a lesbian, staged a fake hate crime against herself, setting off anti-“hate” demonstrations at her campus and becoming a celebrity, and then was caught. The unusual is that she has been seriously punished for it—kicked out of her college, barred from any state university for five years, and arrested for fabricating evidence and lying to police. That’s impressive. Usually people who produce hate hoaxes suffer no serious repercussions. After all, as The Nation put it in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s claim of being kidnapped by several white men, raped by them for several days, and left in a garbage bag with racist slogans scrawled in feces on her body may not have been factually true, but it nevertheless expressed the essential truth of white men’s treatment of black females in America. And shouldn’t society honor people who express the essential truth about it, or at least give them a break if they happen to tell some lies in the course of telling the essential truth?

The Daily Mail reports:

A lesbian student has been kicked out of college and arrested after it emerged she was behind a string of anti-gay messages slipped under her dorm room door, police said.

After the notes were found in Alexandra Pennell’s room at Central Connecticut State University in March, hundreds came out in support of the student at a campus rally against hate crimes.

But when police hid a camera along the hallway outside her room, they allegedly caught her leaving the notes herself—and she admitted she had written them to get the attention of her roommate.

She now faces charges of fabricating evidence, lying to police and making false statements. She has also been barred from attending any state university for five years, the Hartford Courant reported.

It comes after Pennell, 19, reported to campus authorities that she had found the anti-gay notes scrawled on a board on her door and slipped into her room.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 09, 2012 03:05 PM | Send