Members of the Central Park Five have filed a lawsuit against former US President Donald Trump over “false, misleading and defamatory” statements he made about the group during last month’s presidential debate.
During the September 10 debate in Pennsylvania, Trump said the five men had pleaded guilty and “confessed” to the brutal assault and rape of a woman who was attacked while jogging in New York City’s Central Park in 1989.
“They pleaded guilty – they said, ‘They pleaded guilty.’ And I said, ‘Well, if they plead guilty they’re hurting someone very badly, eventually killing someone.’ ‘And if they plead guilty, they’ve pleaded not guilty.’
Runner Trisha Meili survived the attack and did not die.
Despite Trump’s insistence, the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise — never pleaded guilty to the charges against them. Even after being convicted at trial, the five men, who are black and Latino, maintained their innocence.
They were acquitted of all crimes in 2002 when charges were dropped after the real attacker, a convicted serial rapist, confessed to the crime. DNA evidence helped prove the Central Park Five’s innocence after each spent several years in prison.
The group of men has since chosen to be called “The Exonerated Five.”
The lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday. The five men, all now in their 50s, described Trump’s comments as “Clearly falseThey said they were “hurt” by Trump’s defamatory statements.
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Lawyers for the group called Trump’s comments “extreme and outrageous” and said they were “intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the five men. They are seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages for defamation and “severe emotional distress and reputational damage.”
Shannen Specter, an attorney representing the Central Park Five, lamented Monday that “the civil justice system does not allow us to ask Mr. Trump to apologize or retract his statement.”
“The most we can obtain is monetary damages to compensate these five men for the damage Mr. Trump has done to their reputations and to punish Mr. Trump for making these statements,” he said in a statement.
Specter said members of the Central Park Five and their legal counsel are “not holding their breath” waiting for Trump’s apology.
At the time the members of the Central Park Five were indicted in 1989 (when they were teenagers), Trump was speaking publicly about the case. As a real estate mogul, Trump took out large newspaper ads calling on the city to reinstate the death penalty.
Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung called the filing “just another frivolous election interference lawsuit.” Cheung described the members of the Central Park Five as “desperate left-wing activists” and said the lawsuit was filed “to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’ dangerous liberal agenda and her failed campaign.”
Lawyers for the Central Park Five noted in the filing that Salam, a New York City council member, attended the presidential debate, but was not in the room when Trump made the remarks.
Salam tried to Confrontation Trump on comments in the post-debate spin room, where reporters conduct interviews. He was filmed repeatedly shouting questions to the Republican candidate about whether Trump would “apologize to the five who were acquitted.”
“Oh, you’re on my side then,” Trump responded from the podium.
Salam quickly responded, saying: “No, no, no, I am not on your side.”
In August, four members of the Central Park Five attended the Democratic National Convention and stood on stage. MacRae was not among them.
“Every day, as we walked into the courtroom, people were yelling at us and threatening us because of Donald Trump,” Wise told the crowd.
“He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for our execution,” Wise said. “We were innocent children, but we spent a total of 41 years in prison.”
Central Park Five member Korey Wise speaks alongside Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Reverend Al Sharpton at the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Salam also spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention and said: “45 wanted us alive,” referring to Trump as the 45th president of the United States.
“This guy thinks hate is the driving force in America. Not so,” Salam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote; in fact, it’s a human right. So, let’s use it. I want you to walk with us. I want you to walk with us.” “I want you to vote with us.”
The Central Park Five members were wrongly convicted after a high-profile trial in 1990. They said police coerced four of them into making false confessions.
In 2014, officials representing New York City agreed to a US$41 million ($56.7 million CAD) settlement for the five men.
The Central Park Five case has since become culturally synonymous with the growing racial tensions in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
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