Members of the Central Park Five have filed a lawsuit against former U.S. president Donald Trump for “false, misleading and defamatory” statements he made about the group during the presidential debate last month.
During the Sept. 10 debate in Pennsylvania, Trump said the five men pleaded guilty and “admitted” to the brutal assault and rape of a woman who was attacked while running through Central Park in New York City in 1989.
“They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” Trump said on the debate stage. “And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”
The jogger, Trisha Meili, survived the attack and did not die.
Despite Trump’s insistence, the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — never pleaded guilty to the charges against them. Even after they were convicted in a trial, all five men, who are Black and Latino, maintained their innocence.
They were cleared of all wrongdoing in 2002 when the charges were overturned after the real attacker, a convicted serial rapist, confessed to the crime. DNA evidence helped prove the Central Park Five’s innocence after they’d each already served several years in prison.
The group of men has since opted 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, called Trump’s comments “demonstrably false” and said they “suffered injuries” as a result of Trump’s defamatory statements.
Lawyers for the group called Trump’s remarks “extreme and outrageous” and said they were “intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the five men. They are seeking an unspecified amount of financial compensation for defamation and “severe emotional distress and reputational damage.”
Shanin Specter, a lawyer representing the Central Park Five, on Monday expressed regret that “the civil justice system doesn’t permit us to require Mr. Trump to apologize or retract his statement.”
“The most that we can obtain are money damages both to compensate these five men for Mr. Trump’s damaging their reputations and for punishment of Mr. Trump for making these statements,” he said in a release.
Specter said the Central Park Five and their legal counsel “are not holding our breath” waiting for a Trump apology.
At the time the Central Park Five were charged in 1989 (when they were teenagers), Trump was publicly vocal about the case. As a real estate mogul, Trump took out large newspaper ads calling for the city to reinstate the death penalty.
Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, called the filing “just another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit.” Cheung called the Central Park Five “desperate left-wing activists” and said the lawsuit was filed “to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
Lawyers for the Central Park Five noted in the filing that Salaam, a New York City Council member, attended the presidential debate, but was not in the room when Trump made the remarks.
Salaam attempted to confront Trump about the comments in the spin room after the debate, where journalists conduct interviews. He was filmed repeatedly shouting questions to the Republican nominee about whether Trump would “apologize to the Exonerated Five.”
Trump, from the podium, replied, “Ah, you’re on my side then.”
Salaam was quick to respond, “No, no, no, I’m not on your side.”
In August, four members of the Central Park Five attended the Democratic National Convention and stood on stage. McCray was not among them.
Wise told the crowd, “Every day, as we walked into the courtroom, people screamed at us and threatened us because of Donald Trump.”
“He spent US$85,000 on a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for our execution,” Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”
Salaam also spoke on stage at the DNC and said, “45 wanted us unalive,” referring to Trump as the 45th president of the United States.
“That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote; in fact, it is a human right. So, let us use it. I want you to walk with us. I want you to march with us. I want you to vote with us.”
The Central Park Five were wrongfully convicted following a high-profile trial in 1990. They said police coerced four of them into providing false confessions.
In 2014, officials representing New York City approved a US$41 million (C$56.7 million) settlement for the five men.
The case of the Central Park Five has since become culturally synonymous with heightened racial tensions in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s.