Driven by a class discussion to scratch at her face with the pointy end of a protest pin, a University of Michigan student played off her awkwardly conspicuous injury as a politically-motivated mauling by a strange man in downtown Ann Arbor.
She pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of false reporting in court on Monday—and may now face up to 93 days in jail, according to a report from MLive.com.
The student, Halley Bass, 21, told her worried friends that a strange man spotted her anti-Brexit pin—worn in solidarity with immigrants, Bass said—and went after her with a pin of his own. Friends encouraged her to take the story to the police, who, being police, picked up on its inconsistencies. For one thing, Bass didn’t show up on any store surveillance footage from Ann Arbor that day.
Since the election, we’ve seen a rash of fictional hate crimes exposed under investigation—enough that the trend, which The Weekly Standard’s Eric Felten took up in cover story earlier this year, might be better termed an uptick in hate-crime hoaxes than a rising tide of intolerance. College campuses, it’s important we note, are more often than not institutionally (and federally) required to validate students’ baseless allegations.
In her report to police, Bass linked her claim a post-election pattern of hate crimes in her college town, including just days earlier the alleged attack of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab by anonymous but reportedly smelly frat boy. This incident, local police also determined, was a whole-cloth fabrication.
It was an election-crazed College Republican volunteer who orchestrated the last face-scratching hoax.
Bass’s story harks back to October 2008, when Ashley Todd told police that a 6-foot-4 black man flew into a rage at the sight of her McCain-Palin bumper sticker and mugged her at an ATM—scratching a backwards “B” into her cheek and leaving her with a black eye. ATM surveillance footage having proved her wrong, Todd would later claim to have no idea how she acquired the injuries, admitting they might be self-inflicted. She confessed to having made up the story about the attack, but, unlike her Ann Arbor copycat, Todd offered no explanation for her fabrication.
The sad saga of Halley Bass, while not quite Ashley-Todd-caliber weird, has similarly awful timing: The public unmasking of her false allegation fell just a day and half shy of International Women’s Day—this year an anti-Trump women’s strike, “A Day Without A Woman,” to build on the momentum of the post-Inauguration Women’s March.
And the fact of academic feminism’s having triggered her distress certainly doesn’t help.
“I had been in a discussion in my women’s lit weirdly and there were a few people in my class that sort of said some things that scared me,” Bass confessed, adding that afterward, she’d “wanted a concrete reason to be scared.” So, she scratched herself and then created the hate crime, we’re to understand, in order to solidify her shaky sense of ill-ease after class.
Absent any further clues, one has to wonder what the required reading could have been for class that day, what the literary fodder might have been for such a discussion. (Or, I have to wonder, anyway.) Because if it had anything to do with Gertrude Stein’s postwar work as a Nazi-sympathizing Vichy propagandist, I’ll venture scores of women’s lit fans can totally relate to Halley’s emotional turmoil. Apart from whole orchestrating a hoax thing, anyway.
