The BFD | Heads Up, Don’t Bullshit Us

Memory can be a fickle thing. Coupled with the intense urge of many young folk these days for fame – what for is irrelevant: fame is the end in itself – memory quickly becomes whatever it has to be. “It’s not a lie if you believe it,” as Seinfeld’s George Costanza said.

Way back in 2009, Clare Werbeloff achieved instant fame as the “chk-chk-boom!” girl, when she gave reporters a decidedly colourful eyewitness account of a shooting in Sydney’s Kings Cross. As it turned out, whilst colourful, it was not eyewitness – because she made up the whole story. As Clare later admitted, when she saw the team of reporters, she “just wanted to be famous” so badly that she ran right over and made up the best story she could think of. She did indeed become briefly, sort of, famous, including photoshoots in a lad’s mag.

These days, Werbeloff is a speech therapist with no interest in being famous again. But, just like her, silly girls are still lying to make themselves famous – and in today’s political climate, telling the right lies can take you a very long way indeed.

When social justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell was just 12 years old, she and her sister watched a police officer shoot a young boy in a city recreation center because he had ignored the basketball sign-in sheet. This jarring, emotional, and deeply unsettling story was published July 6 at The Atlantic, in the section reserved for ideas, under the bold, attention-grabbing headline, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist.”

Purnell’s deeply personal story of shattered innocence and shattered bones at the end of a policeman’s gun was shared widely among top journalists and activists. “I started her article thinking abolition was impossible and ending thinking it must happen,” the president of a social justice think tank at Harvard wrote on Twitter, quoting his mother. “This is a beautifully written piece,” the Atlantic’s constitutional law editor agreed. “Derecka is the future,” an activist journalism executive declared.

There’s just one problem: there’s no evidence that it ever happened.

Her article in The Atlantic is the first mention it ever earns in her publicly available writings. In fact, it appears to be the first mention of the incident in any publicly available record The Federalist was able to uncover.

The BLM mob would no doubt have us believe that that’s because it’s just something that happens daily in “AmeriKKKa”. But we know that’s a lie: last year, American police killed just nine unarmed blacks. Moreover, the alleged incident must have happened in St. Louis between 2001 and 2003. That was not exactly Alabama in the 1920s.

In addition to a still meaty local media, the United States was on edge: George W. Bush was in the White House, the country was involved in one war and on its way to another, and the police state’s response to terror attacks was under close scrutiny. In all likelihood, a police office shooting would merit at least one local news story.

Like many young ladies of a progressive bent, from journalists to activist lawyers and politicians, Purnell seems to have something of a habit of “sexing up” her past. In this case, with a heavy dose of poverty porn. She has yet to state that she lived in a small shoebox in the middle of the road, but she provides plenty of, ahem, “colourful” descriptions which seem a little difficult to reconcile with the known facts.

Still, The Federalist has given it the ol’ college try and narrowed down a couple of “neighbourhood recreation centres” which must have been the site of the alleged racist incident.

The results, though, do not support a shooting, and certainly not one involving a police officer shooting an unarmed child in front of witnesses.

No one else at St. Louis, from former reporters and city officials to former police and politicians, can remember the story.

“I’m a little bit at a loss for words here because the shooting of a young boy by a cop in a St. Louis Rec Center, even if it had happened 20 years ago, I feel like that would be in my mind somewhere,” [said] mayoral spokesman Jacob Long.

The Federalist has also followed up the story with The Atlantic’s editor, asking whether any of the facts were checked before publication. Neither the editor nor Purnell herself have responded to queries.

Yet Purnell uses the story as the basis for her campaign to abolish the police.