3 college broads lie about a hate crime and end up with assault charges instead
Classy
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ALBANY — The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by.
The Jan. 30 episode, reported to the police, would draw hundreds of people to a campus rally against racism; an emotional response from the university’s president; and even the attention of Hillary Clinton, who condemned the attack on Twitter.
“We are shocked, upset, but we will remain unbroken,” one of the young women who reported the assault, Asha Burwell, said at the rally, on Feb. 1. “We stand here with strength because we value our worth as black women and as human beings in general.”
But only a few weeks later, what seemed to be the latest iteration of a now-familiar debate about race on campus — the protests, the anguished soul-searching, the calls for greater faculty diversity and administrative changes — has metastasized into a controversy of an even more scorching kind: the allegation, the authorities said, was a lie.
Surveillance videos did not support the accounts of the young women, Ms. Burwell, Alexis Briggs and Ariel Agudio. Neither did the statements of multiple fellow passengers. Rather than being victims of a hate crime, the authorities said, the women had been “the aggressors,” hitting a 19-year-old white woman on the bus.
All three pleaded not guilty on Monday to misdemeanor assault charges; Ms. Burwell and Ms. Agudio, who publicized the episode through Twitter, also pleaded not guilty to charges of making a false report. The judge who oversaw the arraignment called the charges, if proved, “shameful.”
It was a turnabout tailor-made to delight conservative media outlets and to ignite social-media recriminations. There were calls for the university’s president, Robert J. Jones, to apologize for his remarks, and for Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, to remove her post on Twitter.
For students and activists in Albany and elsewhere, the stakes were greater. Many feared that the hard-won dialogue over racism on campus, the fragile moment of unity, would disappear under a wave of finger-pointing.
“People were forced to think about things that they didn’t think about, maybe, before,” said Amberly Carter, a coordinator at the university’s Multicultural Resource Center who helped organize the rally. “So do we now stop defending black women because of what happened?”
The Feb. 1 rally, in front of a campus fountain, had seemed to signal an awakening for a university that had watched the University of Missouri, Yale and other institutions grapple with protests over racial discrimination without quite erupting into its own. Young black women spoke of the subtle racism that stamped their daily lives. Students, faculty members and staff members of all races listened intently.
“This time, it was more intense, because the climate on campus shifted to, ‘Oh my gosh, this happened to us,’” said Ms. Carter, who emphasized that she spoke not as an employee but as an advocate for students.
But whatever solidarity emerged has fractured over the charges against the young women, putting their supporters on the defensive. Behind the rush to declare the matter a hoax, they say, is an ingrained prejudice against taking the concerns of minority women seriously.
Activists have also noted that the footage the authorities have released so far is incomplete, offering the possibility that something happened to provoke the young women into a physical confrontation before the videos begin. Though State Police experts have been working to extract clearer audio from the recordings, viewers have noted that it is difficult to determine what is happening in the chaotic, noisy crowd depicted in the videos.
“I walked away saying, ‘I can’t tell you what happened in that video; you haven’t shown me anything to confirm what these young women are saying, and I can’t deny it either, because it’s just not clear to me,’” said Alice Green, a social justice activist and the director of the Center for Law and Justice, based in Albany. She was one of several community and university leaders whom the district attorney invited to review the evidence before charges were brought. “But once you lodge charges against someone,” she added, “in the minds of most people, that’s guilt.”
To Ms. Agudio’s lawyer, Mark Mishler, public opinion had outstripped the available evidence.
The women have received death threats, he said, and their names have been paired on social media with images of nooses and references to lynching.
“The vilification of these young women is quite disturbing and scary,” Mr. Mishler said in an interview.
Many of their peers, however, saw the videos and charges as evidence of betrayal.
“It’s disappointing and saddening that somebody who seemed to be trying to help the movement would be the one to set it back,” said Lauren Hospedales, a freshman, referring to Ms. Burwell. She said she was worried that “it’ll be harder for people to believe and support” minority women in similar situations in the future.
Yet, Ms. Hospedales added, “We needed her to get that conversation started, so it wasn’t a waste of time.”
Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in the university’s English department, who has devoted class time since the bus episode to talking through the implications with her students, said she was concerned that the women’s detractors had failed to consider the prejudice and “racialized language” the young women may have encountered on campus or before the bus ride that could have played a role in provoking the fight.
Whatever the outcome of the criminal cases, Professor Schalk said, the events had already served a useful purpose: making white students aware of the subtle slights that students of color regularly encounter.
“My white students have said this has opened up conversations,” she said. “Things that are inadvertent, small, but that these white students have no experience with, not being a person of color on this campus.”
Yet already, students said, their classmates — on Twitter, on the anonymous bulletin-board app Yik Yak and in passing remarks — had turned from conversations about discrimination and diversity to snickering about what they saw as the young women’s lies.
“I feel like they kind of messed it up for the rest of us,” Olivia Bishop, a junior, said on Tuesday. “It’s like, I stood up for you, and now to figure out that you wanted this whole thing to be a hoax, it’s disappointing. It’s just honestly the saddest thing in the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/ny...of-albany.html
