Tawana Brawley

25 years after her rape claims sparked a firestorm, Tawana Brawley avoids the spotlight Her silence is deafening. Twenty-five years after the spotlight first glared on Tawana Brawley — a black woman who as a teen claimed she was raped by a gang of white men, smeared with feces and stuffed in a garbage bag — she’s desperately struggling to stay hidden from public view. “I don’t want to talk to anyone about that,” Brawley, 40, said recently after The Post found her in Hopewell, Va., where she lives in a neatly kept brick apartment complex with signs warning of video surveillance cameras. By all appearances, her life — so chaotic a quarter-century ago — now seems normal. STARTING OVER: Tawana Brawley goes to work as a nurse in Virginia. J.C. Rice STARTING OVER: Tawana Brawley goes to work as a nurse in Virginia. UPROAR: Brawley joins Al Sharpton at an Atlanta rally in June 1988 — four months before her rape claim was exposed as a lie. AP UPROAR: Brawley joins Al Sharpton at an Atlanta rally in June 1988 — four months before her rape claim was exposed as a lie. Tawana Brawley as a teen in Dutchess County. Tawana Brawley as a teen in Dutchess County. Brawley, using aliases such as Thompson and Gutierrez, now has a young daughter, a neighbor says, and works as a licensed practical nurse at The Laurels of Bon Air in Richmond, where co-workers were clueless about her past. “Are you serious? We don’t know her by that name. Isn’t that a trip?” squealed one staffer, who called Brawley, known to staff as Tawana Gutierrez, “a good worker.” On a recent Friday, Brawley, noticeably heavier and dressed in pink scrubs, emerged from her apartment at about 6:30 a.m. with a small child and a man wearing red hospital scrubs. The two left in separate cars — Brawley in a Chrysler Sebring and the man and child in a Ford Taurus. She arrived at work in Richmond about 30 minutes later, and the man pulled in minutes afterward. Hopewell — where Brawley has lived for at least a year, according to a neighbor — has the highest rate of violent crime per capita of any city or town in Virginia, local cops say. Plagued by drugs and guns, it had five murders in the last three weeks. Jittery residents call police at even the slightest suspicion. “You break wind here and they call us,” one veteran officer said. State records show “Tawana V. Gutierrez” and “Tawana V. Thompson” have held the same nursing license since 2006. The Virginia Board of Nursing confirmed issuing it to a “Tawana Vacenia Thompson Gutierrez.” Brawley maintains a PO box in Claremont, Va., under the name Gutierrez, according to sources. That town is a 45-minute drive from Hopewell and is the residence of her stepdad, Ralph King, who spent seven years in prison in the 1970s for killing his first wife. Locals in the rural mill town described King, who lives in a ramshackle house near the end of a dead-end street where dogs run wild, as a nasty man and said they hadn’t seen Tawana in years. “He’s real mean,” one man said. King declined to be interviewed. A quarter-century ago, Brawley, then just 15, told a story incredible for its sheer brutality. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/brawley_defiant_life_in_hiding_E9DV7S9hJAvGW6qmrISeaL