The five men who make up the Central Park Five and now call themselves the Exonerated Five have filed a defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump over his remarks during the presidential debate last month.
The lawsuit focuses on the Sept. 10 debate in Pennsylvania, where Trump said the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise — pleaded guilty when they were tried in connection with the assault and rape of a woman who had been running in Central Park on April 19, 1989, and that the victim had died.
During the debate, he said: “They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”
At the time of the trials, each had pleaded not guilty, and the victim of the attack survived.
The complaint said Trump’s statements are “demonstrably false,” adding: “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.” The complaint further said that the men, now in their 50s, have “suffered injuries as a result of Defendant Trump’s false and defamatory statements.”
The five, who were teenagers when they were indicted, maintained their innocence throughout their trials and incarceration. In their trials, they were charged with the assault of the female jogger, as well as other assaults and robberies in Central Park.
The five spent years behind bars before they were exonerated in 2002 after DNA evidence linked another man, a serial rapist, to the attack. The city ultimately agreed in a legal settlement to pay the exonerated men $41 million.
The case was subsequently heavily scrutinized as the five claimed they were intimidated and coerced to make false confessions.
The case came at a time of heightened racial tensions and when crime dominated headlines. Trump, then a real estate mogul, had taken out large ads in newspapers calling for New York to bring back the death penalty.
The defamation suit was filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The complaint noted that Salaam, a New York City Council member representing District 9, was at the debate and in the room when Trump made the statements.
The five men, who did not specify damages, asked for a trial to determine them.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said, “This is just another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
Shanin Specter, an attorney for the five, said Monday: “Unfortunately 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.”
While he said it would be “helpful” if Trump apologized or retracted his statements, “we are not holding our breath for that.”
