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The 18-year-old Muslim woman from Long Island told police and media outlets in early December that she was riding the subway home one night from Baruch College, where she is a business student, when three drunk men cornered her and began screaming "Donald Trump!"
"Oh look, a f---- terrorist," they purportedly yelled. "Get the hell out of the country!"
Yasmin Seweid tried to ignore their taunts, she said, but that only made things worse. First they yanked on her bag, breaking the strap, then tried to rip her hijab off her head, Seweid told the New York Daily News on Dec. 3. Throughout the whole ordeal, she said, no one on the packed train came to her aid.
The incident bore many of the same hallmarks as scores of other anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents reported in the wake of Donald Trump's November victory in the presidential election.
But police now say it was all a lie.
On Wednesday, nearly two weeks after the alleged attack, Seweid was arrested on misdemeanor charges of filing a false report and obstructing government administration, New York Police Department spokesman Adam Navarro told The Washington Post.
Navarro said he could not comment on the circumstances surrounding Seweid's arrest. But the Daily News and DNAinfo, citing anonymous police sources, reported that Seweid admitted to police she fabricated her story because she was having family troubles at home.
It was not immediately clear Wednesday whether Seweid had retained an attorney or entered a plea.
Seweid's father, Sayeed Seweid, said he did not know why his daughter would have invented the attack.
"You try to raise your children as best you can," he told DNAinfo. "She's a bright, good girl. She's young and maybe she was foolish here."
"Young kids," he added, "you don't understand their mentality."
In November, a female student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed to have been beaten, robbed and had her hijab ripped off by two men, one of whom was wearing a white "Trump" hat. After investigating the incident, local police said the woman "admitted that she fabricated the story about her physical attack as well as the removal of her hijab and wallet by two white males."
When Seweid reported her alleged attack at the beginning of December, police opened a hate-crime investigation, according to DNAinfo. The day after she said she was attacked, dozens of New Yorkers turned up at Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan in solidarity with her, carrying signs that read "fight hate" and "#notinourcity."
For nearly two weeks, the young woman stood by her story, even as police struggled to find video and witnesses who could corroborate her story, DNAinfo reported. She even recounted the incident in an emotional Facebook post, according to BuzzFeed News.
"It breaks my heart that so many individuals chose to be bystanders while watching me get harassed verbally and physically by these disgusting pigs," she wrote in the post, which has since been deleted. "Trump America is real and I witnessed it first hand last night! What a traumatizing night."
Then, last week, Seweid went missing for two days, stoking doubts about her story, according to the Daily News. She turned up safe at a friend's house on Friday.
Albert Cahn, an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York, told the Daily News that Seweid's episode should not detract from legitimate accounts of anti-Muslim attacks, which he said were underreported.
"Clearly this has been a trying time for her and her family," Cahn said. "We hope that they receive all possible support in this moving forward."