A group of New Yorkers formerly labeled the “Central Park Five” by New York media are suing presidential candidate Donald Trump for defamation, after his comments about them during a televised presidential debate last month. The five men – Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Anton McCray – were sentenced to decades of prison time collectively after being wrongfully accused of violently attacking and raping a woman in Central Park in 1989. They were all minors at the time. The attack’s investigation and subsequent trials, as well as the media’s quick rush to judgment against the accused, is widely viewed in retrospect as a damning low point and clear sign of racial bias in the city’s institutions. The five men were exonerated after suing the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. New York City settled for $41 million.
During her debate with Donald Trump on September 10th, Kamala Harris brought up his actions at the time of the scandal – Trump had bought a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty against the five boys – saying that it showed his long history of using race to “divide the American people.” Trump defended his actions and distorted the facts of the case, leaning on the five boys’ guilty pleas: “And I said, well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately.” The victim in the case, Trisha Meili, largely recovered from the attack, left with some lingering problems to her balance and vision after a 12-day coma and months of recovery.
Trump has remained insistent that these five suspects were guilty despite the decades worth of subsequent investigations after their conviction that have indicated otherwise. Immediately after their exoneration in 2014, Trump penned an opinion piece in the Daily News calling the settlement a “disgrace,” and insisting that “settling doesn’t mean innocence.” The convictions against the five men were overturned on the basis of DNA evidence and another person’s admission of guilt. Trump would go on to slander the Exonerated Five on the campaign trail in 2016 along similar lines, and again in 2019 in response to criticisms from John McCain by saying, like he did in the debate, that they had “admitted their guilt.”
The lawsuit is filed in Philadephia, accusing Trump of “false and defamatory” statements about the case. The lawyer representing the men, Shahin Specter, emphasized the difficulty they face in reclaiming their lives decades after their ordeal due to Trump’s actions: “It is devastating to be accused of these things all over again on national television to an audience of 67 million people.”
This would be the second defamation trial against Trump this year, as a jury found him liable for $83.3 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll in January, after he made defamatory statements disparaging her and denying her allegations of rape against him.
