Crime & Safety

Muslim Teen Faked Story of NYC Subway Attack by White Trump Supporters, Police Say

Yasmin Seweid, 18, was arrested Wednesday and charged with filing a false police report.

MANHATTAN, NY — Yasmin Seweid, the Muslim teen from Long Island who said she was attacked and harassed in the 23rd Street subway station and the 6 train by three white, male Trump supporters in their 20s, has been accused by the NYPD of making the whole thing up.


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Seweid, an 18-year-old Baruch College student, was arrested Wednesday on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, after detectives who had been investigating her story came to the conclusion that she had been lying all along.

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"The entire story is false," an NYPD spokesman told Patch.

Pictured: Seweid on the Dec. 3 cover of the Daily News.

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The young woman has been charged with two misdemeanor crimes, the spokesman said: first, filing a false police report, and second, obstructing governmental administration.

Seweid originally told police she was attacked around 10 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 1, in the 23rd Street subway station near her school by a trio of white, male 20-somethings who shouted "Donald Trump!" and tried to remove her headscarf, or hijab.

She said in a followup interview with the New York Daily News that she was on her way home from an event at Baruch College, standing on the 6 train platform, when the three men approached her. “I heard them say something very loudly, something about Donald Trump," she remembered. "... I also heard them say the word terrorist and I sort of got a little scared."

The men continued harassing her on the train, she said, and yanked the strap on her purse so hard that it broke.

She said the other passengers on the train did nothing. “It made me really sad after when I thought about it,” Seweid told the Daily News. “People were looking at me and looking at what was happening and no one said a thing. They just looked away.”

The 18-year-old's sickening tale of being attacked on a busy subway line in America's largest city — and of her fellow commuters' failure to intervene — was picked up by major news outlets and social-media giants around the world. However, some became skeptical when inconsistencies started to appear between Seweid's various interviews, and when she went missing from her family's home on Long Island for a couple days late last week.

Lead photo courtesy of the Nassau County Police Department

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