Immigration Clearinghouse

Most of us remember the supposed “rape” that brought Shawna Forde into the public eye. The “rape” that wasn’t. The “rape” that Immigration Clearinghouse immediately questioned as suspect based on the phony photos of her injuries?

Police found evidence that made them skeptical as soon as they began investigating the supposed rape.

Summoned by a halting 911 call, officers found Shawna Forde curled up on the kitchen floor of her ex-husband’s north Everett home. She was partially nude. The blue sweatpants she’d been wearing were wadded up and tossed atop the number 13, which somebody had scrawled on the floor with felt-tipped marker, according to police reports.

Officers immediately noted details that didn’t fit Forde’s claim of a violent attack.

Neighbors living downstairs in the duplex hadn’t heard a struggle.

The rest of the home was neat and orderly.

Forde’s purse sat undisturbed on a table near the door, her wallet, cell phone and car keys inside.

When they tried to question Forde, 41, she appeared so groggy that one officer wrote that she may have been on drugs. Her eyelids fluttered as she seemed to slip in and out of consciousness.

But as she was wheeled out the door on a stretcher, Forde told crews to stop so she could grab her purse.

“I thought that it would require that she be fairly alert to grab hold of the purse as she passed quickly through the entry way,” officer Brandon Gill wrote.

Another officer noticed the superficial cuts on Forde’s forearms and thighs — wounds she would later tell detectives came from the knife used by her attackers.

The shallow cuts were consistent with “hesitation wounds,” often seen when people deliberately hurt themselves, the officer wrote. Moreover, they already were scabbed over, and appeared to be at least a day old, according to police reports. _{Scott North Everett Herald}

Within literally hours of the attack, when most victims of rape would be seeking the solace of family or retreating to make sense of the crime, Forde was calling The Everett Herald to ask if a story was planned on her attack. The newspaper was asked by detectives to wait before writing a story, giving them time to sort out what was going on.

When Forde was told that a story would not be coming immediately, she decided to publish on her group’s Web site intimate details about her rape report, including photographs of what she said were her injuries and part of a medical report.

Forde did this before giving police a formal interview about the attack, something rape victims are normally asked to do. The detectives assigned to investigate wrote that she didn’t return phone calls and failed to keep appointments.

She didn’t meet with a police artist to help with a sketch until Jan. 7. Her interview with detectives didn’t occur until Jan. 13.

And perhaps the telling event shows the motive for this false claim of rape. According to our friend Scott North, who viewed the reports of this case, one of the last entries on the detectives notes was that Forde had attempted to qualify for state aid after the attack, but was denied after officials reviewed her medical records.

And as we know, shortly after this incident, the phony gunshot wound in an alley close to her home, where she was allegedly shot in the arm by unnamed assailants, coming home from a skid row bar. Not the behavior of a rape victim.