Megan Williams Case

The Megan Williams case involves a 20-year-old African American woman from West Virginia who originally claimed that she was kidnapped, raped and tortured in an allegedly racist attack by six white residents from Logan County, three of whom are women, in August 2007. Among many other things, the suspects were charged with stabbing Williams, dousing her with hot water, and forcing her to eat rat, dog, and human feces. In addition, the suspects were alleged to have hurled racial slurs at her while doing so. The torture and sexual assault was said to have been carried out for about a week.

At the time civil rights leaders, community activists and others asserted that the apparent racial motive made the incident subject to prosecution under hate crimes statutes. Authorities did not initially file hate crime charges in the attack, but prosecutors did not completely rule out such a move down the road. When pressed on the possibility of such charges, authorities said that they were focused on the charges with the toughest penalties, noting that the maximum sentence for a hate crime was just 10 years. One defendant was convicted of a hate crime in the incident.

In October 2009, Williams recanted her accusations against five of the defendants, but still accuses her former boyfriend, Bobby Ray Brewster, of abuse.