As of this writing on Feb. 18, 2019, the public awaits a resolution of actor Jussie Smollett’s claim to have been the victim of a racist and homophobic street attack, and anonymous counter-allegations that he hired two men to stage the attack. While the controversy has shocked many people, I am most shocked by many high-profile intellectuals and politicians apparently never having heard of fake sympathy attacks. The following is an edited and updated version of my 2007 essay on the subject. (Image: Scorpio chats with reporters after staging a fake sympathy beating in "Dirty Harry.")
Surely there is no brand of crime more obscure, or more poignant, than this: paying someone to beat you up so you may garner sympathy for ends pathetic, nefarious or mysterious.
I first learned of the remarkable underworld of sympathy beatings not from some news story or personal fight club plunge, but rather the way most people garner their pseudo-criminology: from the movies.
For me, it was the oft-quoted Clint Eastwood thriller Dirty Harry (1971), wherein the villain—in what even a disgusted Pauline Kael grudgingly heralded as a “virtuoso plot development”—pays someone to beat him up so he can pretend to be a victim of police brutality. The staged attack comes somewhat superfluously, since he actually is a victim of police brutality throughout the film, an apparent paradox that turns out to be a key to the real-life phenomenon.
Dirty Harry is about how the titular cop hunts down and kills “Scorpio,” a hippie-but-racist sniper/rapist/kidnapper/etc., despite the hassle of all sorts of bleeding-heart laws up to and including the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. It depicts a nightmarish, topsy-turvy world where the brazen criminal can’t be charged with a crime and the cop breaks all kinds of laws. A score featuring horror-movie “wahhh-wahhh-wahhh-wahhhhhhh”s underlines the mood. The villain is given to spectacularly innovative perversities, such as approaching a store owner famous for shooting robbers and then robbing him of his criminal-killing gun. And, of course, Scorpio claims to be a police beating victim after having himself beaten—thus become a criminal who accuses a cop of crime.
The beating scene is deliberately weird and disorienting, presented without explanation or foreshadowing. We merely see Scorpio hobbling (due a previous injury actually inflicted by Dirty Harry, I hasten to note) toward a creepy, decaying, abandoned building, where awaits a mysterious, neatly dressed man. Scorpio enters and hands over a wad of cash.
“You really want 200 dollars’ worth?” the mystery man asks.
“Every penny of it,” comes the reply.
The man seats Scorpio on an old chair. “Might as well get comfortable. Go on, sit.”
The man becomes creepily, unnecessarily friendly—a professional at work, but what type of work remains spookily unclear. He loosens the villain’s scarf like a doctor or masseuse. “Relax, take it easy.” Then menacing black gloves are pulled on. “It’s gonna be alright.”
Then the man proceeds to punch the crap out of Scorpio, knocking him to the ground.
“You sure you want the rest of it?” he asks.
“Every penny’s worth…,” confirms Scorpio, adding a racial insult, his malignancy extending even to a partner in crime.
The “rest of it” is merely a kick. Whether that was really it, or the man is just disgusted now, is unclear. He adds one more kick: “This one’s on the house.” He tosses the bleeding, groaning Scorpio outside.
Cut to a hospital, where Scorpio is heavily bandaged on a hospital gurney, giving his story to reporters and claiming Dirty Harry dished out the beating. At City Hall, Dirty Harry and the police chief watch it all on TV. Harry remarks that “anybody can tell I didn’t do that to him.” The police chief, understanding his role as the straight man, takes the bait and asks how. “’Cause he looks too damn good, that’s how,” Harry snarls.
Watching this movie decades ago as a young—too young—viewer, my mind was blown by this sequence, and not only for the enthralling weirdness of cynical self-martyrdom. I was particularly fascinated by the man who did the beating. Were we to understand that performing sympathy beatings is his main criminal offering, an item called the “Full 200” on a menu of sins? Or was he just some kind of enforcer, in this odd case paid to victimize his own employer?
In a movie’s nightmare landscape, such unresolvable mysteries add to the appeal. In reality, it’s a far different type of mystery, as I learned in 2007, when I first heard of a real-life “Full 200.”
A news story informed me that the previous year, in Gardner, Massachusetts, a 29-year-old gas station manager allegedly had a friend beat him up as part of a scheme to steal $7,000 in a faked robbery. The job was so convincing that the alleged thief suffered permanent vision damage despite undergoing two surgeries.
Suddenly opening before me was a world where you really could find guys pulling on black leather gloves in the basements of decaying buildings—or at least friends willing to clock you for a conspiracy.
Digging through newspaper archives, I found several more cases of fraudulent sympathy attacks, and kept track of more in the ensuing years.
In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1952, a cab driver paid a man to beat him up in the hopes of receiving a hospital-bed sympathy visit from his ex-wife. She didn’t show.
Then there was the most disturbing example: the 1997 and 1998 claims by a North Carolina woman that she was twice “tied up and whipped because she is a lesbian.” In 1997, the woman’s mother found her “shirtless, beaten and tied to the front porch of her home. Painted on the steps was the message, ‘Jesus Weren’t Born for You, Faggot.’” In 1998, the woman’s family found her again “beaten and tied spread-eagle to the rear deck of her home,” where she had reportedly spent two hours in the sun.
Later that year, an acquaintance of the woman came forward and admitted that she hired him to do the 1997 beating, paying him $50 out of a promised $300. He told police he had gone with her to a Walmart and “purchased a leather work belt then whipped her with it while she lay on her bed.”
The woman reportedly had been repeatedly harassed for her sexual orientation.
The Dirty Harry beating scene notwithstanding, there are also fraudulent sympathy shootings. In 2007, a man in Hartford, Alabama, was found in a cotton field with two gunshot wounds; after a week-long manhunt for a phantom criminal, authorities charged him with orchestrating his own shooting “basically to gain sympathy from family members.” The shooter reportedly was an employee of the man, and threatened with firing if he didn’t, well, fire. The victim succeeded in gaining sympathy from police and prosecutors as well, who initially did not file charges.
In 2008 came an ambiguous case from Washington State: a 21-year-old man who claimed to be the victim of a drive-by shooting while jogging, but allegedly was shot by a friend, either to avoid a drug test at work or simply to “know what it was like to get shot.” As often happens, media attention evaporated after “victim” and shooter were both charged.
I find poignancy, even tragedy, in all of these reports. They tend to wind up as false police report charges, but that never really clarifies their nature. There’s some social truth lurking in them that the adversarial system never really gets to, just brushes aside as irrelevant.
There are shades of Munchausen syndrome, the psychological disorder where a person subjects themselves or others to unnecessary medical treatments to gain attention and sympathy. Sympathy, indeed, is the mysterious quality at the heart of these staged fake crimes. If you know someone well enough to ask them to beat you up or shoot you, presumably you already have a significant measure of sympathy in your life. And yet some dilemma causes the hoaxer to employ that sympathy in a way that results in more pain.
Even the superficially straightforward motive of covering up a crime becomes complicated by this mystifying interpersonal dynamic. The mental intensity and horrific intimacy of such an artificial attack must be overwhelming. Yet media reports about sympathy attacks are curiously incurious. In those I found, almost all the attention went to the fake victims, while I find the person who agreed to injure them at least as psychologically and criminologically interesting, just like that mysterious figure in Dirty Harry. Never in these news stories was there an explanation of how the idea was brought up, rarely any hint of how it was executed, and often no follow-up on the legal case.
The obvious difficulty in drawing conclusions about such solicited attacks is their rarity and small sample size. A broader—if still cloudy—picture emerges from the far more common phenomenon of self-harming fake sympathy attacks. Perhaps the most infamous case is Charles Stuart, who shot himself to cover up his murder of his pregnant wife in 1989 in Boston, then blamed the crime on a non-existent black man. The still-mysterious, still-suspicious 1987 case of Tawana Brawley, who claimed to have been raped and dumped in a trash bag by racists, may fit in here as well.
In newspaper archives, I found about four-dozen reports of self-harming sympathy attacks between 1992 and 2009. Often, the reports don’t clarify the nature of the injuries, or even confirm that the injuries were real, let alone who actually created them. “False police report” only tells us about the lie; it omits a lot of truths. Here are some examples:
• c. 1996, Fullerton, California: A teenage girl reports an attempted abduction in which the attacker clawed her chest. She reportedly scratched herself to back up the story so she could explain why she came to school late.
• 1997, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: A cab driver reports he was beaten, stabbed and robbed by three people. He had actually gambled away his fare money, and hit and cut himself.
• 1998, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota: A senior beats and cuts her own face, claiming that two men did it while yelling anti-gay slurs. She later confesses.
• 1998, Dallas, Texas: A city code inspector who previously complained about unsafe working conditions claims she was beaten and raped on the job. She later confessed that she inflicted bruises and scratches on herself, and that semen on her clothing was her husband’s.
• 1999, University of Massachusetts (exact branch unidentified): At a rally about sexual assaults, a woman shows up with a cut face and says a man just attacked her. She later confessed to doing it herself.
• 2006, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada: A teenage Sikh boy claims he was attacked by five men who yelled racist slurs, beat him and tore off his turban and hacked off his hair. He actually beat himself to cover for getting a haircut his parents disapproved of.
• 2006, Boise State University, Idaho: A student claims he was beaten near campus by other students in an anti-gay attack. He actually beat himself with sticks and his own fists.
• 2006, South Jordan, Utah: A high school teacher charged with having sex with a student claims she was beaten at her home by two students in retaliation. She had undescribed injuries serious enough that she was airlifted to a hospital. Police said they were self-inflicted.
• 2006, Henderson, Nevada: A judge’s wife accuses him of throwing her and causing a facial injury when she struck a banister. She later confesses to causing the injury herself by rubbing her face against a carpet.
• 2007, Gloucester, England: A man shot himself seven times in the chest and arm with a nail gun, causing critical wounds and making himself eligible for hefty payments from a government compensation fund for violent crime victims. He falsely claimed to have been attacked by black and “mixed-race” criminals.
• 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: A 20-year-old white Texan college student and John McCain campaign volunteer for then presidential candidate John McCain claims that a gigantic black man robbed her, told her, “You are going to be a Barack supporter,” then cut the letter “B” into her cheek with a knife. The victim reportedly confessed to inventing the tale, according to police.
• 2009, Clay County, Kentucky. In a fatal version, a U.S. Census worker is found dead, bound and tied to a tree with the word “FED” written on his chest. Authorities deem it a suicide staged to look like a homicide so his family could collect life insurance.
From this mash of reports, it’s easy to distill the theme of attention-seeking, and to refine it further into obvious categories: sociopolitical causes; revenge; loneliness; covering up a crime or mistake.
It’s so easy that the phenomenon sinks into the tar pit of blithe pop criminology about false reporting: “Oh, it’s about attention-seeking. Bye.” In newspaper stories, criminologists can be found making such generic comments/dismissals, though as far as I can tell, no one even tracks false police reports comprehensively. Occasionally, the sociopolitical subgenres of false rape reports and false hate crime reports get more particular attention, but I couldn’t find a single study or even comment regarding the import of the modus operandi—the key to the strangeness of sympathy attacks.
Like every falsehood that evolves from lie to hoax, sympathy attacks are never totally false. After all, something really did happen. The story is literally false, but the act is literally true—in some emotional way. Staged crimes are shadow plays based on society’s light source; they may tell us about the solidities behind them. As a rape crisis center director said in one article on hoax tales, “When somebody files a false report, something else is wrong. It’s never just a blind cry.”
Sympathy attacks often appear to act out verbal/atmospheric/emotional violence—a way to make oft-dismissed threats and pain real and turn them into something people will pity you for. Some cases suggest an inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of non-violent protest: Instead of letting yourself be beaten to prove the oppressor’s violence and cause shame to surface, you do the beating yourself.
Of course, the “oppressor” can be perceived rather than real. There seems to be some links here to conspiracy theories and ploys—like the way the Nazis covered their invasion of Poland by faking a Polish invasion against themselves, or those Sept. 11 false-flag nuts who claim the U.S. government attacked itself.
With a lack of media follow-through in all but the most spectacular cases, the analysis of sympathy attacks—if you can dignify it with the name—is left to culture warriors. After all, that’s where I first heard of the phenomenon—a right-wing propaganda thriller written specifically to put crosshairs on the Warren Court’s boosting of criminal defendants’ rights.
For the right wing, fake sympathy attacks amount to victims victimizing themselves and thus demolishing the pillars of identity politics. Conservative groups have particularly seized on faked anti-gay crimes in an attempt to discredit gay rights initiatives, often while implying some sort of secret cabal behind it all. That there is some validity to the right-wing view is nowhere better seen than in the right-wing fake sympathy attacks based on the paranoid fantasy of reverse racism.
Overlooked in the conservative view is that fake sympathy attacks only work because there is so much real victimization—as Dirty Harry himself acknowledged with the “he looks too damn good” punchline. Scorpio could credibly fake police brutality only because his city was full of it already; just as in the real world only a fool would suggest that false insurance claims mean accidental fires never happen, or that false rape reports mean rape is nonexistent. Sympathy attacks cannot innovate a brand of crime, or will not be successful if they try.
That is generally the left-wing view of fake sympathy attacks, and why lefty thought leaders are so often incredibly gullible in believing them. A common pattern on the college-campus sympathy attacks involves exposure, followed by apologists saying the fake crime is an incarnation, expression or elaboration of what the majority already does to people, or how it makes them feel. True enough, as far as it goes; which can go too far in viewing artifice as art and mechanism as excuse.
I see an interplay in the right and left views; for example, a homophobic sympathy attack can work only where there is still bigotry, but enough growing tolerance for sympathy to be evoked—that is to say, in an era of civil rights controversy like ours.
But in the end, all the right and left have to say is that their culture wars will suck up anything, and that the right wing is gullible about right-wing hoaxes and the left wing about left-wing hoaxes. They tell us nothing about apolitical sympathy attacks; about a cabbie who just wants to see his ex.
There’s some deeper truth to sympathy attacks, one that doesn’t score political or tribal points any more than the Dirty Harry mystery dude with his black leather gloves did. Sympathy attacks are symptomatic of a cold, lonely society where beating somebody up is a perceived solution and getting beaten up is the only thing considered undeniably piteous. Sympathy attacks are theater for clouded, jaded eyes—or at least a chilly deal in a much colder bargain where we all, one way or another, get every penny’s worth.
Surely there is no brand of crime more obscure, or more poignant, than this: paying someone to beat you up so you may garner sympathy for ends pathetic, nefarious or mysterious.
I first learned of the remarkable underworld of sympathy beatings not from some news story or personal fight club plunge, but rather the way most people garner their pseudo-criminology: from the movies.
For me, it was the oft-quoted Clint Eastwood thriller Dirty Harry (1971), wherein the villain—in what even a disgusted Pauline Kael grudgingly heralded as a “virtuoso plot development”—pays someone to beat him up so he can pretend to be a victim of police brutality. The staged attack comes somewhat superfluously, since he actually is a victim of police brutality throughout the film, an apparent paradox that turns out to be a key to the real-life phenomenon.
Dirty Harry is about how the titular cop hunts down and kills “Scorpio,” a hippie-but-racist sniper/rapist/kidnapper/etc., despite the hassle of all sorts of bleeding-heart laws up to and including the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. It depicts a nightmarish, topsy-turvy world where the brazen criminal can’t be charged with a crime and the cop breaks all kinds of laws. A score featuring horror-movie “wahhh-wahhh-wahhh-wahhhhhhh”s underlines the mood. The villain is given to spectacularly innovative perversities, such as approaching a store owner famous for shooting robbers and then robbing him of his criminal-killing gun. And, of course, Scorpio claims to be a police beating victim after having himself beaten—thus become a criminal who accuses a cop of crime.
The beating scene is deliberately weird and disorienting, presented without explanation or foreshadowing. We merely see Scorpio hobbling (due a previous injury actually inflicted by Dirty Harry, I hasten to note) toward a creepy, decaying, abandoned building, where awaits a mysterious, neatly dressed man. Scorpio enters and hands over a wad of cash.
“You really want 200 dollars’ worth?” the mystery man asks.
“Every penny of it,” comes the reply.
The man seats Scorpio on an old chair. “Might as well get comfortable. Go on, sit.”
The man becomes creepily, unnecessarily friendly—a professional at work, but what type of work remains spookily unclear. He loosens the villain’s scarf like a doctor or masseuse. “Relax, take it easy.” Then menacing black gloves are pulled on. “It’s gonna be alright.”
Then the man proceeds to punch the crap out of Scorpio, knocking him to the ground.
“You sure you want the rest of it?” he asks.
“Every penny’s worth…,” confirms Scorpio, adding a racial insult, his malignancy extending even to a partner in crime.
The “rest of it” is merely a kick. Whether that was really it, or the man is just disgusted now, is unclear. He adds one more kick: “This one’s on the house.” He tosses the bleeding, groaning Scorpio outside.
Cut to a hospital, where Scorpio is heavily bandaged on a hospital gurney, giving his story to reporters and claiming Dirty Harry dished out the beating. At City Hall, Dirty Harry and the police chief watch it all on TV. Harry remarks that “anybody can tell I didn’t do that to him.” The police chief, understanding his role as the straight man, takes the bait and asks how. “’Cause he looks too damn good, that’s how,” Harry snarls.
Watching this movie decades ago as a young—too young—viewer, my mind was blown by this sequence, and not only for the enthralling weirdness of cynical self-martyrdom. I was particularly fascinated by the man who did the beating. Were we to understand that performing sympathy beatings is his main criminal offering, an item called the “Full 200” on a menu of sins? Or was he just some kind of enforcer, in this odd case paid to victimize his own employer?
In a movie’s nightmare landscape, such unresolvable mysteries add to the appeal. In reality, it’s a far different type of mystery, as I learned in 2007, when I first heard of a real-life “Full 200.”
A news story informed me that the previous year, in Gardner, Massachusetts, a 29-year-old gas station manager allegedly had a friend beat him up as part of a scheme to steal $7,000 in a faked robbery. The job was so convincing that the alleged thief suffered permanent vision damage despite undergoing two surgeries.
Suddenly opening before me was a world where you really could find guys pulling on black leather gloves in the basements of decaying buildings—or at least friends willing to clock you for a conspiracy.
Digging through newspaper archives, I found several more cases of fraudulent sympathy attacks, and kept track of more in the ensuing years.
In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1952, a cab driver paid a man to beat him up in the hopes of receiving a hospital-bed sympathy visit from his ex-wife. She didn’t show.
Then there was the most disturbing example: the 1997 and 1998 claims by a North Carolina woman that she was twice “tied up and whipped because she is a lesbian.” In 1997, the woman’s mother found her “shirtless, beaten and tied to the front porch of her home. Painted on the steps was the message, ‘Jesus Weren’t Born for You, Faggot.’” In 1998, the woman’s family found her again “beaten and tied spread-eagle to the rear deck of her home,” where she had reportedly spent two hours in the sun.
Later that year, an acquaintance of the woman came forward and admitted that she hired him to do the 1997 beating, paying him $50 out of a promised $300. He told police he had gone with her to a Walmart and “purchased a leather work belt then whipped her with it while she lay on her bed.”
The woman reportedly had been repeatedly harassed for her sexual orientation.
The Dirty Harry beating scene notwithstanding, there are also fraudulent sympathy shootings. In 2007, a man in Hartford, Alabama, was found in a cotton field with two gunshot wounds; after a week-long manhunt for a phantom criminal, authorities charged him with orchestrating his own shooting “basically to gain sympathy from family members.” The shooter reportedly was an employee of the man, and threatened with firing if he didn’t, well, fire. The victim succeeded in gaining sympathy from police and prosecutors as well, who initially did not file charges.
In 2008 came an ambiguous case from Washington State: a 21-year-old man who claimed to be the victim of a drive-by shooting while jogging, but allegedly was shot by a friend, either to avoid a drug test at work or simply to “know what it was like to get shot.” As often happens, media attention evaporated after “victim” and shooter were both charged.
I find poignancy, even tragedy, in all of these reports. They tend to wind up as false police report charges, but that never really clarifies their nature. There’s some social truth lurking in them that the adversarial system never really gets to, just brushes aside as irrelevant.
There are shades of Munchausen syndrome, the psychological disorder where a person subjects themselves or others to unnecessary medical treatments to gain attention and sympathy. Sympathy, indeed, is the mysterious quality at the heart of these staged fake crimes. If you know someone well enough to ask them to beat you up or shoot you, presumably you already have a significant measure of sympathy in your life. And yet some dilemma causes the hoaxer to employ that sympathy in a way that results in more pain.
Even the superficially straightforward motive of covering up a crime becomes complicated by this mystifying interpersonal dynamic. The mental intensity and horrific intimacy of such an artificial attack must be overwhelming. Yet media reports about sympathy attacks are curiously incurious. In those I found, almost all the attention went to the fake victims, while I find the person who agreed to injure them at least as psychologically and criminologically interesting, just like that mysterious figure in Dirty Harry. Never in these news stories was there an explanation of how the idea was brought up, rarely any hint of how it was executed, and often no follow-up on the legal case.
The obvious difficulty in drawing conclusions about such solicited attacks is their rarity and small sample size. A broader—if still cloudy—picture emerges from the far more common phenomenon of self-harming fake sympathy attacks. Perhaps the most infamous case is Charles Stuart, who shot himself to cover up his murder of his pregnant wife in 1989 in Boston, then blamed the crime on a non-existent black man. The still-mysterious, still-suspicious 1987 case of Tawana Brawley, who claimed to have been raped and dumped in a trash bag by racists, may fit in here as well.
In newspaper archives, I found about four-dozen reports of self-harming sympathy attacks between 1992 and 2009. Often, the reports don’t clarify the nature of the injuries, or even confirm that the injuries were real, let alone who actually created them. “False police report” only tells us about the lie; it omits a lot of truths. Here are some examples:
• c. 1996, Fullerton, California: A teenage girl reports an attempted abduction in which the attacker clawed her chest. She reportedly scratched herself to back up the story so she could explain why she came to school late.
• 1997, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: A cab driver reports he was beaten, stabbed and robbed by three people. He had actually gambled away his fare money, and hit and cut himself.
• 1998, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota: A senior beats and cuts her own face, claiming that two men did it while yelling anti-gay slurs. She later confesses.
• 1998, Dallas, Texas: A city code inspector who previously complained about unsafe working conditions claims she was beaten and raped on the job. She later confessed that she inflicted bruises and scratches on herself, and that semen on her clothing was her husband’s.
• 1999, University of Massachusetts (exact branch unidentified): At a rally about sexual assaults, a woman shows up with a cut face and says a man just attacked her. She later confessed to doing it herself.
• 2006, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada: A teenage Sikh boy claims he was attacked by five men who yelled racist slurs, beat him and tore off his turban and hacked off his hair. He actually beat himself to cover for getting a haircut his parents disapproved of.
• 2006, Boise State University, Idaho: A student claims he was beaten near campus by other students in an anti-gay attack. He actually beat himself with sticks and his own fists.
• 2006, South Jordan, Utah: A high school teacher charged with having sex with a student claims she was beaten at her home by two students in retaliation. She had undescribed injuries serious enough that she was airlifted to a hospital. Police said they were self-inflicted.
• 2006, Henderson, Nevada: A judge’s wife accuses him of throwing her and causing a facial injury when she struck a banister. She later confesses to causing the injury herself by rubbing her face against a carpet.
• 2007, Gloucester, England: A man shot himself seven times in the chest and arm with a nail gun, causing critical wounds and making himself eligible for hefty payments from a government compensation fund for violent crime victims. He falsely claimed to have been attacked by black and “mixed-race” criminals.
• 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: A 20-year-old white Texan college student and John McCain campaign volunteer for then presidential candidate John McCain claims that a gigantic black man robbed her, told her, “You are going to be a Barack supporter,” then cut the letter “B” into her cheek with a knife. The victim reportedly confessed to inventing the tale, according to police.
• 2009, Clay County, Kentucky. In a fatal version, a U.S. Census worker is found dead, bound and tied to a tree with the word “FED” written on his chest. Authorities deem it a suicide staged to look like a homicide so his family could collect life insurance.
From this mash of reports, it’s easy to distill the theme of attention-seeking, and to refine it further into obvious categories: sociopolitical causes; revenge; loneliness; covering up a crime or mistake.
It’s so easy that the phenomenon sinks into the tar pit of blithe pop criminology about false reporting: “Oh, it’s about attention-seeking. Bye.” In newspaper stories, criminologists can be found making such generic comments/dismissals, though as far as I can tell, no one even tracks false police reports comprehensively. Occasionally, the sociopolitical subgenres of false rape reports and false hate crime reports get more particular attention, but I couldn’t find a single study or even comment regarding the import of the modus operandi—the key to the strangeness of sympathy attacks.
Like every falsehood that evolves from lie to hoax, sympathy attacks are never totally false. After all, something really did happen. The story is literally false, but the act is literally true—in some emotional way. Staged crimes are shadow plays based on society’s light source; they may tell us about the solidities behind them. As a rape crisis center director said in one article on hoax tales, “When somebody files a false report, something else is wrong. It’s never just a blind cry.”
Sympathy attacks often appear to act out verbal/atmospheric/emotional violence—a way to make oft-dismissed threats and pain real and turn them into something people will pity you for. Some cases suggest an inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of non-violent protest: Instead of letting yourself be beaten to prove the oppressor’s violence and cause shame to surface, you do the beating yourself.
Of course, the “oppressor” can be perceived rather than real. There seems to be some links here to conspiracy theories and ploys—like the way the Nazis covered their invasion of Poland by faking a Polish invasion against themselves, or those Sept. 11 false-flag nuts who claim the U.S. government attacked itself.
With a lack of media follow-through in all but the most spectacular cases, the analysis of sympathy attacks—if you can dignify it with the name—is left to culture warriors. After all, that’s where I first heard of the phenomenon—a right-wing propaganda thriller written specifically to put crosshairs on the Warren Court’s boosting of criminal defendants’ rights.
For the right wing, fake sympathy attacks amount to victims victimizing themselves and thus demolishing the pillars of identity politics. Conservative groups have particularly seized on faked anti-gay crimes in an attempt to discredit gay rights initiatives, often while implying some sort of secret cabal behind it all. That there is some validity to the right-wing view is nowhere better seen than in the right-wing fake sympathy attacks based on the paranoid fantasy of reverse racism.
Overlooked in the conservative view is that fake sympathy attacks only work because there is so much real victimization—as Dirty Harry himself acknowledged with the “he looks too damn good” punchline. Scorpio could credibly fake police brutality only because his city was full of it already; just as in the real world only a fool would suggest that false insurance claims mean accidental fires never happen, or that false rape reports mean rape is nonexistent. Sympathy attacks cannot innovate a brand of crime, or will not be successful if they try.
That is generally the left-wing view of fake sympathy attacks, and why lefty thought leaders are so often incredibly gullible in believing them. A common pattern on the college-campus sympathy attacks involves exposure, followed by apologists saying the fake crime is an incarnation, expression or elaboration of what the majority already does to people, or how it makes them feel. True enough, as far as it goes; which can go too far in viewing artifice as art and mechanism as excuse.
I see an interplay in the right and left views; for example, a homophobic sympathy attack can work only where there is still bigotry, but enough growing tolerance for sympathy to be evoked—that is to say, in an era of civil rights controversy like ours.
But in the end, all the right and left have to say is that their culture wars will suck up anything, and that the right wing is gullible about right-wing hoaxes and the left wing about left-wing hoaxes. They tell us nothing about apolitical sympathy attacks; about a cabbie who just wants to see his ex.
There’s some deeper truth to sympathy attacks, one that doesn’t score political or tribal points any more than the Dirty Harry mystery dude with his black leather gloves did. Sympathy attacks are symptomatic of a cold, lonely society where beating somebody up is a perceived solution and getting beaten up is the only thing considered undeniably piteous. Sympathy attacks are theater for clouded, jaded eyes—or at least a chilly deal in a much colder bargain where we all, one way or another, get every penny’s worth.