The Central Park Five defendants are suing former President Donald Trump for defamation over comments he made during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise were the center of a cause celebre in 1989 when they were convicted of attacking and raping a jogger in Central Park. After several years in prison, the five were exonerated following a new confession and DNA evidence. In a lawsuit filed Monday, the defendants alleged that Trump made false statements that caused them harm.
The lawsuit alleged that “his false and defamatory statements with ill will and spite, and with wanton, reckless or willful disregard for their injurious effects on Plaintiffs.”
Trump had briefly touched on the Central Park Five case during the debate, hinting at their possible guilt, when Harris brought up his involvement in the case. Trump put out a full-page newspaper ad on May 1, 1989, calling for the return of the death penalty shortly after the Central Park jogger attack happened. However, the ad made no mention of the jogger attack and didn’t call for any specific executions, rather bemoaning the state of rising crime in New York City in general.
“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 at last month’s debate. “And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”
The five defendants all pleaded not guilty, and the woman who was attacked, though grievously injured, ultimately ended up surviving.
Also included in the lawsuit was an encounter between Salaam and Trump after the debate, when the former asked him if he would apologize.
“Ah, you’re on my side then,” Trump said to Salaam. When the defendant said that he wasn’t a supporter, Trump waved and walked away.
“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 alleged.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung waved off the lawsuit in a statement, obtained by the Washington Post.
“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,” he said.
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The defendants have repeatedly blamed Trump for the popular sentiment against them, most recently in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“Our youth was stolen from us every day as we walked into courtroom, people scream at us, threaten us because of Donald Trump,” Wise said.