“It’s not that you’re innocent until proven guilty, you are innocent, period.” So said Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, about Mark Curtis, a leading member of the SWP arrested and convicted in the 1988 rape of a 15-year-old black working class girl. This book examines the campaign of misinformation and distortion conducted by the SWP in relation to the case.
Curtis was apprehended after the victim’s 11-year-old brother called the 911 emergency number to report a rape in progress. Despite the open-and-shut case against Curtis, the SWP launched a defense campaign throughout the US land internationally, suppressing the facts of the case and presenting Curtis as the victim of a frame-up.
The Mark Curtis Hoax basis its analysis on a study of the 450-page trial transcript and other documents, and examines the motivation behind this conscious attempt to defraud the labor movement.