The Central Park 5 are suing Trump over Philly debate comments

Members of the Central Park Five (also called the Exonerated Five) are suing former President Donald Trump for defamation over comments he made during last month’s presidential debate, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court on Monday.

The five, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown (formerly Antron McCray), and Korey Wise, were wrongfully convicted in 1989 of a brutal assault on a New York jogger in Central Park. They were just teens then and ultimately spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit before being exonerated by DNA and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer.

But during the September debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Trump said that at the time the teenagers “admitted – they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.” The victim in the case is still alive and deals with lingering health effects from her attack. The five never pled guilty for the crimes they were charged with.

The lawsuit alleges that Trump defamed the men, “cast them in a harmful false light and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them,” attorney Shanin Specter said in a statement.

“The Plaintiffs seek to correct the record and clear their names once again,” Specter said. The five men are looking for a trial by jury and for Trump to pay an undetermined amount in compensatory damages, punitive damages and other costs, the lawsuit says.

An attorney for Trump is not yet listed on the case.

Prior to the comments Trump made during the debate last month in Philadelphia, there have been a number of times Trump has falsely claimed that the men were responsible for the attack, according to the lawsuit. Following the assault of the jogger in 1989, Trump famously took out full-page ads in the city’s major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for those responsible — further inciting racial tensions in the city.

Read on to learn more about the case that is making headlines, again.

What happened in April 1989?

In 1989, Trisha Meili was a 28-year-old investment banker out for a jog in Central Park when she was brutally beaten and raped. Following the violent attack, Meili fell into a coma for almost two weeks and retained no memory of the attack.

New York City at the time was dealing with high violent crime rates and the media covered the case extensively. On the same night Meili was attacked, witnesses told media and police that groups of teenage boys attacked passersby and other joggers, robbing and beating them.

Police brought in a group of Black and Hispanic teen boys — Brown (then McCray), Richardson, Santana, Wise and Salaam — and subjected them to intense questioning.

“The boys were christened the ‘Wolf Pack,’ and quickly became symbols of the criminal menace that white New Yorkers felt had captured their city,” Poynter said of the media at the time.

Trump jumped on the media circus of the day and purchased his full-page ad in The New York Times and other major city newspapers.

Again and again, Trump has stood by the false belief that the men are guilty

Trump has never apologized for taking out the full-page ad (which didn’t name the five men explicitly) and decades later continues to repeat claims that they were responsible for the attack. Trump’s comments during the September debate were “part of a continuing pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct toward Plaintiffs stretching back decades,” the lawsuit filed Monday alleged.

The lawsuit also points to a number of times in recent years, including during media interviews, editorials and in social media posts, in which Trump continued to falsely claim the Exonerated Five were guilty.

Salaam wrote in his article that when Trump was asked about the case during the 2016 presidential race, he said, “They admitted they were guilty.” And in a statement to CNN at the time Trump also said, “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”

Salaam said Trump’s claims do damage, and cause fear and stress.

“In some ways, I feel like I’m on trial all over again. I know what it is to be a young black man without a voice — like Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, who were killed and then crucified in the press. Even though the Central Park Five were found innocent by a court of law, we are still guilty in the eyes of many,” Salaam wrote. “That brings a certain kind of stress.”

Three years later, in 2019, Trump again said, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt,” The New York Times reported. “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that.”