Civil rights lawyer Alton Maddox Jr., who represented victims of several notorious racist attacks in New York in the 1980s, has died. He was 77.
Maddox died Sunday in a Bronx nursing home, funeral director Isaiah Owens said.
Maddox represented Tawana Brawley, a Black teenager who claimed that a group of white men had abducted and raped her in 1987. A grand jury determined that Brawley’s story was a hoax, and former prosecutor Steven Pagones sued Maddox, fellow attorney C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton for defamation for accusing him of taking part in the alleged attack.
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