While most people have happily ignored racist disbarred lawyer Alton Maddox for years, I now have learned from Room 8 that he still has some fans.
As a necessary corrective to some of the nonsense recently written about him here, here is what really happened as a result of Maddox’s role in the Brawley hoax.
More than two years after he was found to have defamed a former prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley case, Alton H. Maddox Jr. has finished paying off a $95,000 damage award against him.
The prosecutor, Steven A. Pagones, a former Dutchess County assistant district attorney, received a payment from Mr. Maddox of just over $39,000 on Monday, Karen Blaustein-Birchler, one of Mr. Pagones's lawyers, said yesterday. In 1998, a jury in Dutchess County decided that Mr. Maddox, the Rev. Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Ms. Brawley had defamed Mr. Pagones by wrongly accusing him of being one of a group of men who abducted and raped Ms. Brawley over several days in 1987.
Last year, Mr. Maddox vowed that he would fight to overturn the verdict in appellate courts and would not pay ''one red penny'' to Mr. Pagones, but the state's highest court later ruled that Mr. Maddox had failed to provide information necessary for an appeal.