OAN Staff Abril Elfi
5:15 PM – Monday, October 21, 2024
Members of the “Central Park Five” have filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump for “false statements” they allege that he made regarding their 1989 case during a presidential debate last month.
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On Monday, the five members, who now call themselves the “Exonerated Five,” filed the suit, accusing Trump of spreading “false, misleading and defamatory” statements about their 1989 case during the September 10th ABC News presidential debate.
In the lawsuit, the five men, identified as Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise, argued that Trump knew he was acting with “reckless disregard” for the truth when he said that they pleaded guilty to crimes connected to the beating and rape of woman in New York City, and that the five teenagers “badly hurt a person, killed a person” in the attack.
It cites statements Trump made after his presidential opponent, Kamala Harris, attacked him for buying ads in the past that called for the death penalty of the woman’s attackers at the time, when New Yorkers were outraged and fully consumed by the case. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer, and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” the advertisement stated.
“Defendant Trump’s statements were false and defamatory in numerous respects,” attorneys for the men wrote in a joint statement. “[The] Plaintiffs never pled guilty to the Central Park assaults. Plaintiffs all pleaded not guilty and maintained their innocence throughout their trial and incarceration, as well as after they were released from prison.”
“None of the victims of the Central Park assaults were killed,” the lawyers added.
Meanwhile, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung referred to the lawsuit as “just another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit,” and claimed it was merely brought to “distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
The men seek compensatory and punitive damages. The lawsuit also claims that Trump’s remarks portrayed them in a false light, which prompted them to “suffer severe emotional distress.”
The five men, who were teenagers at the time of the incident, had been accused of raping and assaulting a 28-year-old female jogger named Trisha Meili in Central Park in April 1989. At the time, she was found beaten so badly that she went into a coma for 12 days. Meili also lost memory of the brutal incident as soon as she finally came to.
Additionally, “at the same time that she was headed out for her run, police were scrambling to respond to calls about 30 to 40 teens who were harassing people in the park,” ABC News reported.
Even though the men had always maintained their innocence, they were still convicted and served years in prison. However, more than a decade after the attack, a different man, Matias Reyes, went to the police and confessed to the crime, which authorities say was confirmed through DNA analysis.
During the presidential debate in September, Trump was responding to a statement from Vice President Kamala Harris, in which she revisited his full-page ad in The New York Times in the wake of the incident that called for the execution of the Central Park Five.
“[T]hey come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people including Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg agreed with me on the Central Park Five. 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 guilty,” Trump said previously.
The lawsuit highlights Trump’s statements, including how none of the men had entered guilty pleas in the case, none of the victims of the Central Park assaults were killed, and the mayor at the time of the assaults was Ed Koch.
According to the court filing, Salaam, one of the Central Park Five members, was present at the debate and attempted to confront Trump about his comments in the spin room afterwards.
Salaam claimed he repeatedly shouted questions to Trump, saying, “Will you apologize to the Exonerated Five?” and, “Sir, what do you say to a member of the Central Park Five, sir?”
“Plaintiff Salaam was attempting to politely dialogue with Defendant Trump about the false and defamatory statements that Defendant Trump had made about Plaintiffs less than an hour earlier, but Defendant Trump refused to engage with him in dialogue,” the lawsuit noted.
The five men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, and Wise, who was still incarcerated at the time, was released early. The group sued New York City in 2003, and after a decade-long standstill, the case was settled for $41 million. The city did not admit any wrongdoing by its police department or prosecutors.
Social media users on X chimed in and commented on the news of the lawsuit.
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