In 1987, Tawana Brawley was found unresponsive in a plastic bag, covered in feces, and with racial slurs written on her body. She later said she had been held in a cabin and raped by white men for days. In 2012, a gay club in Chicago was defaced with slurs and burned to the ground. In 2015, black students at Kean University received death threats on Twitter.

These high-profile incidents were all investigated as hate crimes and garnered sympathy around the country. They were also all found to have been faked.