Kyle Wood, an openly gay Republican campaign worker in Wisconsin, admitted on Monday that he faked a bias attack against himself.
Last Thursday, The Daily Caller reported Wood’s allegation that he was the victim of vandalism and assault because he was a gay man working for straight Republican Chad Lee in his congressional race against gay Democrat Mark Pocan.
“A spokesman for Rep. Mark Pocan and an attorney representing his partner, Philip Frank, said they were considering suing for libel over claims that Frank threatened Wood,” The Daily Page reports.
Cases of false victims reporting hate crimes against themselves are not as unusual as they may sound. Last week, police concluded that an alleged attack by the Ku Klux Klan on Sharmeka Moffitt, an African-American woman, was faked.
In 2007, a noose was found hanging outside the office of black Columbia University Teachers College professor Madonna Constantine, who was later investigated for hanging the noose herself to divert attention from plagiarism charges that eventually led to her termination.
And during the 2008 presidential campaign, Ashley Todd, a volunteer for Republican candidate Sen. John McCain in Pennsylvania, claimed to have been robbed by a black man who, seeing a McCain bumper sticker on her car, carved a reverse “B” into her face for “Barack Obama.” Todd was later found to have invented the incident.
In possibly the most infamous modern case of false-crime reporting, in 1987, black 15-year-old Tawana Brawley reported that she had been raped by six white men, including a police officer, and smeared with feces and racial insults. With Rev. Al Sharpton at the lead, the case ratcheted up racial tension across the country before a grand jury eventually found that Brawley had faked the attack.