The Nation - News from June 19, 1988

Advisers to Tawana Brawley intensified their efforts to discredit a former associate, Perry J. McKinnon, by introducing his estranged wife, who said McKinnon’s “mind has been going year by year.” McKinnon, 39, last week charged that the black teen-ager’s story of being abducted and raped by six white men last November was a “pack of lies” and that her advisers had embellished the story for political purposes. The woman, Aljetta McKinnon, 36, was flown to New York from Reidsville, Ga., by the Brawley family advisers--the Rev. Al Sharpton and lawyers Alton H. Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason. At a news conference in Brooklyn, Sharpton said that although McKinnon had never divorced Aljetta McKinnon, he had married two other women. The Brawley advisers offered no evidence to support their charges.