The alleged crime was shocking: an 18-year-old gay man, tossed out of a fraternity party after a number of homophobic brutes beat him, stripped him, choked him, robbed him, and shouted anti-gay slurs at him. A horrific ordeal for anyone to go through.

But it didn’t happen:

Police in Grand Forks, N.D. have announced that a gay man who claimed to have been the victim of a hate crime at a University of North Dakota fraternity party fabricated his entire story. The man accused of inventing the latest bogus hate crime is Haakon Gisvold, reports local ABC affiliate WDAZ-TV.

Last August, Gisvold — who is not a University of North Dakota student — accused members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity of abusing him at the party because he is gay. After getting stripped and beaten, he claimed that “he hid in some bush wearing only his underwear until some kind soul came along with some clothes.”

“I just want those guys to learn from this,” Gisvold said at the time. “They could go to jail, sure, but they could go to jail and then come out with the same mindset that they don’t like homosexuals.”

The episode was indeed a learning experience, but for Gisvold:

After an investigation that included identifying 150 possible witnesses, investigators concluded that exactly zero evidence exists to support any of Gisvold’s hate-crime allegations. “Throughout the investigation we looked at many different angles and many different things and we uncovered some of those details,” University of North Dakota police spokesman Dan Weigel told WDAZ late last week. Investigators are so certain that Gisvold’s story is false that they have asked the county prosecutor to file a criminal charge of providing false information to police against Gisvold.

The county prosecutor has indicated that he will not pursue any charges against the hoaxer.

This incident is the latest in a string of hate-crime hoaxes that have occurred in recent years, all undertaken to either advance or exploit the leftist narrative of minority victimhood. Commentator Michelle Malkin has dubbed the phenomenon “faking the hate,” and has blogged about it for many years.

A database of fake hate crimes in the U.S. can be found here.