NEW YORK, March 17 (UPI) -- A disbarred lawyer for a black New York teen who falsely accused six white men of rape in 1987, says her wages shouldn't be garnished to pay a defamation award.
Tawana Brawley's former lawyer, Alton Maddox, said in a letter to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that Steven Pagones, a former prosecutor who won a defamation suit in 1997 after Brawley falsely claimed he was one of the men who attacked her in 1987, should not get money from garnishing Brawley's wages from her nursing job, the New York Post reported Sunday.
"New York and Virginia have conspired to deprive her of property without due process of law," Maddox's letter, which he posted on his Web site, reads. Brawley, who now goes by the name Tawana Vacenia Thompson Gutierrez, works at a licensed nurse at a nursing home in Virginia.
"The things he's saying on his Web site are outright lies. It's ludicrous," said Pagones.
Pagones got a court order in January to collect on his defamation award.
Brawley was ordered in 1997 to pay $190,000 at 9 percent interest annually. She hadn't paid any of it before the garnishment order, and her bill currently amounts to $431,492, the Post reported.
Brawley's wages from her employment as a licensed nurse in a nursing home are being garnished at $150 per week, but Pagones still has not gotten any of it as the money is being held in escrow, giving Brawley an opportunity to file an appeal, the Post reported.
