. In one instance, found Wells-Barnett, a black man in Indianola, Mississippi, was lynched for raping the local sheriff's 7-year-old daughter. When Wells-Barnett went to investigate, however, she found something very different:
Wells traveled to Indianola and met the alleged rape victim, who was no girl but a grown woman in her late teens. The "brute," Wells learned, had worked on the sheriff's farm for a number of years and was acquainted with every member of the family. The woman had been found in her lover's cabin by her father, who led a lynch mob in order to save his daughter's reputation.