(RightIsRight.co) – An alleged incident involving racist slurs during a women’s volleyball game at Brigham Young University has been exposed as a hoax by a small student newspaper after the mainstream media failed to investigate it at all.
The racist incident, which never happened, was claimed to have occurred on August 26 when Duke University’s women’s volleyball team played against Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, reports CommonSense.News.
According to Rachel Richardson, 19, the only black starter on the Duke team, she and the other black players were severely attacked with racist slurs and barely managed to finish the match.
The fake scandal, though, didn’t hit the American public until it caught the attention of Richardson’s godmother, Lesa Pamplin, a criminal defense attorney running for a judgeship in Texas, and Richardson’s father, Marvin Richardson, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
“My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench,” Pamplin claimed on Twitter.
Her tweet got 185,000 likes and elicited a response by LeBron James: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!!! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood! We have her back. This is not sports.”
On August 27, The New York Times published a report on the incident that never happened, citing the father, Marvin Richardson.
“As the crowd got more hyped and the epithets kept coming, [my daught] wanted to respond back but she told me she was afraid that, if she did, the raucous crowd could very well turn into a mob mentality,” he told the paper.
The scandal grew further, with Utah’s Governor, Spencer Cox, declaring his disgust with the incident in a statement. In addition, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated covered the “shocking racist incident.”
“Except it didn’t happen,” Common Sense writes, detailing how none of the mainstream media cared to do some basic journalism and go and investigate the claims.
Two student writers did that job for The Cougar Chronicle, a conservative campus newspaper at Brigham Young University. They revealed that the search for any evidence into the racist abuse claims at the women’s volleyball game against Duke University had not found any evidence whatsoever that they could be true.
Subsequently, Brigham Young University stated that none of the existing video footage and interviews with over 50 people who attended the game had “found evidence of a single fan yelling a single slur.”
Even so, the latest coverage of the hoax scandal by The New York Times still “treated the events as unresolved.”
“B.Y.U. did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by Richardson, and the statements by both universities left questions unanswered,” The NYT wrote.
