Lying South Carolina woman arrested for blaming Black man in fake Walmart parking lot attack

Kristen Michelle Rimes, 26, lied about the Nov. 26 incident and was charged with filing a false police report and false swearing to police.

Kristen Rimes TheGrio
Kristen Michelle Rimes (Courtesy of Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center)

Kristen Michelle Rimes, a white woman in South Carolina who claimed she was attacked by a shadowy figure who attempted to rob and sexually assault her in a Walmart parking lot, has been arrested and charged with lying to police.

Rimes, 26, lied about the Nov. 26 incident and was charged with filing a false police report and false swearing to police. An investigation found that Rimes was not even on the Walmart property that night.

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At the time of the incident, Rimes posted pictures complete with bruises on her cheeks and nose and a bloody cut above her eye on Facebook. Rimes also filed a police report that claims that she was “assaulted by an unknown male suspect,” according to a news release from the police.

Rimes claims the unknown man said “Hey, girl” to her before suddenly punching her in the face and dragging her from the car. She went on to say that the man dragged her from the car and assaulted her.

“He started tugging on my pants,” Rimes told South Carolina news site Cola Daily on Nov. 27.  “Then I suddenly hear another guy scream, ‘What’s going on over there?’ And at that point, the guy took off,” “The man who yelled never came back, I just take it as an angel sent from God right at that time.”

“I wanted to get home and get out of there,” she added. “I went first thing Monday morning to file the police report to pull camera footage, which I am so mad at myself for not calling them that night. I think I was in such shock.”

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Rimes claimed she didn’t get a good look at the suspect, yet when asked for a description, she was oddly specific.

“He was a black male, medium build, wearing a hoodie with a jacket over it,” she said, repeating the often used trope of blaming a mystery Black man of assaulting a white woman.

According to police, Rimes’ post about the incident and subsequent police report, caused “a public concern,” police said in the news release.

Rimes was arrested in December and taken to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, police reported in the news release.

Her claim that her assailant echoes hundreds of incidents over the years where a panic was caused when a woman implicated a phantom black man as an assailant. The incident comes as this year is the 25th anniversary of Susan Smith claiming she was carjacked, and her two children taken, by a hooded Black man in South Carolina.

Smith was later found to have killed the kids and made up the Black man as a cover for the murder. She was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison in 1995.

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