2024-10-21 18:02:00
Five men wrongly convicted of the 1989 rape of a woman in New York’s Central Park filed a defamation lawsuit against the Republican nominee on Monday. Donald Trump for comments made during a presidential debate.
The lawsuit, filed in a Pennsylvania court, accuses the former president of making “false and defamatory” comments during the September 10 debate with his rival, the Democrat Kamala Harris.
The five men – four black and one Latino – were teenagers when they were accused of raping and nearly killing a young white woman who was running in a New York park.
Despite the gaps in the indictment and the fact that their DNA did not match that of the crime scene, the five they were unjustly convicted and spent 6 to 13 years in prison before a serial rapist confessed to being responsible for the attack.
In 2014, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise received $41 million in compensation for their time behind bars.
During the presidential debate, Trump “falsely claimed that Plaintiffs killed a person and pleaded guilty to the crime,” according to the lawsuit. “Those statements are false.”
“The plaintiffs never pleaded guilty to any crime and were subsequently acquitted of any wrongdoing.”
Subjected to lengthy interrogations without the presence of lawyers, the young people were prosecuted on the basis of confessions in which they accused each other and which they later claimed they had made under pressure.
The prosecution also recalled that eleven days after the Central Park attack, Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers calling for “bringing back the death penalty.”
Trump referenced the “Central Park Five” after Harris mentioned that ad during the debate to illustrate her argument that Trump uses race to “divide Americans.”
“They admitted, they said… they pleaded guilty,” Trump said.
“And I said, well, if they pleaded guilty, seriously injuring one person, ultimately killing one person….”
“They pleaded guilty … then they pleaded not guilty,” Trump said.
The case, which dominated headlines and highlighted racial discrimination in New York, inspired the Netflix drama miniseries “This Is How They See Us.”
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