The five Black and Hispanic teenagers who were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 r@pe of a white jogger in New York’s Central Park sued former US president Donald Trump for defamation over statements he made at last month’s US presidential debate.
Known widely as the Central Park Five, the defendants spent between five and 13 years in prison before they were cleared in 2002 based on new DNA evidence and the confession of another person.
Trump, the Republican nominee for the White House, falsely said at the Sept 10 debate with Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris that the Central Park Five had killed a person and pleaded guilty.
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.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia by Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise, called Trump’s statements “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, had 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 that occurred in Central Park.
The five spent years behind bars before being 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.
A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign on Monday called the case “just another frivolous, election interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists.”
A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Shanin Specter, said in a statement that Trump’s remarks “cast them in a harmful false light and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them.”
Specter denied any political motive in the lawsuit. “I’m not commenting on politics. We are seeking redress in a court of law,” he said.
The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages for reputational and emotional harms as well as punitive damages.
