Turnaround is fair play. When Yusef Salaam was accused of being one of the five young men who attacked a runner in Central Park, Donald Trump took out full page ads in New York papers calling for their execution. The so-called “Central Park Five” were later exonerated but that did not prevent Donald Trump from declaring them guilty before any due process.
Now more than 30 years later, Mr. Salaam has taken out an ad in The New York Times, against Donald Trump, on the day that he was arrested and arraigned in a New York court of law for the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
Leading with a bold headline, “Bring back justice & fairness. Build a brighter future for Harlem!,” Salaam, who is running to represent central Harlem on the New York City Council, tweeted his response Tuesday evening to Trump’s historic indictment on 34 counts and arraignment.
“After several decades and an unfortunate and disastrous presidency, we all know who exactly Donald J. Trump is — a man who seeks to deny justice and fairness for others, while claiming only innocence for himself.”
Trump, the first former president in history to face criminal charges, pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records at an appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday.
On April 30, 1989, Trump, then a brash and influential real estate tycoon, took out a reported $85,000 worth of ads in four New York newspapers with the headline: “Bring back the death penalty, bring back our police!” regarding the case of the Central Park Five — Kevin Richardson, 14, Raymond Santana, 14, Antron McCray, 15, Korey Wise, 16, and Salaam, 15 — who had been wrongfully accused of raping and assaulting a white female jogger in New York City’s Central Park.
Foreshadowing the venom and division that he has sown in later decades, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them”.
After they spent years in prison, the convictions of the now “Exonerated Five” were eventually vacated in 2002, following DNA evidence and a confession from a man named Matias Reyes, which affirmed that they had been wrongfully convicted of various crimes.
Salaam’s ad follows a one-word statement, “Karma,” issued by his campaign last Thursday when news broke of Trump’s indictment. In Tuesday’s response, Salaam reflected on living with trauma due to “systemic oppression imposed by the injustice system.”
“Being wrongfully convicted as a teenager was an experience that changed my life drastically,” he wrote in the ad. “But the problem our community faced when my name was splashed across the newspaper a generation ago — inadequate housing, underfunded schools, public safety concerns, and a lack of good jobs — became worse during Trump’s time in office.
“Here is my message to you, Mr. Trump: In response to the multiple federal and state criminal investigations that you are facing, you responded by warning of ‘potential death and destruction,’ and by posting a photograph of yourself with a baseball bat, next to a photo of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg,” the ad continued.
“These actions, just like your actions leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, are an attack on our safety. Thirty-four years ago, your full-page ad stated, in all caps: CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS. You were wrong then and you are wrong now.”
But Salaam, more gracious than Trump had been in 1989, ended with a hope that the former president gets a “presumption of innocence” and a fair trial.
