While the men pleaded not guilty to an infamous attack in New York’s Central Park for which they were ultimately cleared – despite Trump’s calls then for their execution – in the presidential debate Trump made claims about their guilt “with reckless disregard” for the truth – which is that hate remains his sole “animating force.”
Monday’s lawsuit stems from the 35-year-old case in which five Black and Latino teenagers – Antron McCray, 15, Kevin Richardson, 14, Raymond Santana, 14, Korey Wise, 16, and Yusef Salaam, 15 – were charged with the rape and assault of a white 28-year-old woman jogger and Wall Street executive; the April 19, 1989 attack was so brutal the woman, later identified as Trisha Meili, had a fractured skull and lost three-quarters of her blood.
The case, exposing deep fault lines of race, class, crime and inequality in criminal justice and coming amidst a long spiral of racial rancor driven by soaring crime, riveted New York City for years. It also harshly divided and failed the city on multiple fronts. “The channels of New York’s institutional life – its law enforcement and courts, its elected officials, even its media – were charged with redressing the suffering of a single, badly victimized individual,” wrote the New Yorker on the 30th anniversary of the case. “They did not. Rather, they quintupled that suffering elsewhere.”
Facing city-wide hysteria, police produced five suspects who quickly became known as the Central Park Five. Given the racist fever, they also became known as a “wolf pack” preying on (mostly white) victims, “monsters,” per Mayor Ed Koch, who hailed from “a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance.”
They were no longer minors or teenagers; they weren’t even human. After hours of police “questioning” – or what later was revealed as police railroading, terrorizing and coercion – four of the panic-stricken boys confessed on video to the crime. Soon after, once the frenzied dust settled, they took back their confessions.
They all pleaded not guilty to rape and assault, and continued to maintain their innocence through their trials and incarceration for between seven and 13 years, a total of 41 years between them. Meili survived; she remained comatose for 12 days, spent several months in the hospital, and in 2003 released a book titled I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility.
The five boys’ attorneys continued to work on their behalf, and in 2002 they were exonerated after a serial rapist named Matias Reyes confessed to the assault; new DNA evidence utimately confirmed his guilt. After being released, the now-Exonerated Five sued New York City for their unjust imprisonment. In 2014, after a 14-year court battle, they settled their lawsuit with the city for $41 million.
Yusef Salaam, the only one of the five who never “confessed” and who served nearly seven years for a crime he did not commit, went on to become a public speaker, criminal justice reform advocate and author – Better Not Bitter – who earned an honorary doctorate and Lifetime Achievement Award from President Obama. Last year Salaam, 50, was elected as a New York City Council member for his hometown of Harlem on an Equity & Empowerment platform that stressed, “I am one of us.” “I am here because (you) believed in me,” he told voters at his victory. “I (give) people the hope that they had been losing in our community.”
Because he’s always been a racist, vengeful ghoul, Trump famously took out $85,000 full-page ads in several New York newspapers around the time of the trial demanding, in all-caps, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so,” he wrote, calling the suspects “crazed misfits.” “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.”
Over 35 years, through their exoneration, their settlement with the city and extensive media coverage about the injustice done to them, Trump has never admitted he was wrong, repeatedly refused to apologize – “You have people on both sides of that” – and continued assailing the five men, from decrying the city’s settlement to trashing a 2013 Ken Burns documentary about the case as “a one-sided piece of garbage” to claiming in 2019 the teenagers had “admitted their guilt.”
So it was, in their September debate, that Kamala Harris saw fit to remind viewers of perhaps the most egregious act of racism in her opponent’s lifetime of racism, from being sued in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black families to spreading “birther” smears about Obama to launching a political career by fearmongering about Mexican rapists. “This is the same individual,” she noted, “calling for the execution of five Black and Latino boys who were innocent.”
In response, Trump sputtered, raged, named the wrong mayor – Bloomberg not Koch – he claimed agreed with him, and lied again. “They admitted…they said, they pled guilty. They badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.” Not, and not. Online, people responded to news of the lawsuit with the same disgust for “a foul, stinking, piece of trash,” a sociopath without empathy whose feeble brain gets “stuck in a groove (where) the five must always be guilty.” If he has any money left from his multiple trials, said pretty much everyone, “I hope they get everything.’
The lawsuit charges “defendant Trump’s statements were demonstrably false and defamatory.” It notes “plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime,” they maintained their innocence through trial, incarceration, and release after being “cleared of all wrongdoing,” and nobody was killed. The men have anew “suffered injuries,” said attorney Shanin Specter, and “seek to correct the record and clear their names once again.”
The justice system can’t require Trump to apologize, he noted; that would be helpful, “but we are not holding our breath.” Trump spokesman Steven Chueng dismissed it all as “just another frivolous election Interference lawsuit filed by desperate left-wing activists to distract the American people.” The five saw it as a vital response to more ugly, untenable lies. Yusef Salaam was at the debate; afterwards, he went backstage to Trump’s “spin room” to introduce himself as “one of the Exonerated Five.” A clueless Trump exclaimed, “Ah, you’re on my side then.” “No, no, no,” said Salaam. “I’m not on your side.”
In August, four of the Exonerated Five attended the DNC, where they were loudly cheered. They were introduced by the Rev. Al Sharpton, who praised Jesse Jackson for teaching him “to fight for what’s right.” Korey Wise recalled the time 35 years ago when “our youth was stolen from us,” in part because of Donald Trump.
The stately Yusef Salaam, also revisiting their past, declared, “Forty-five wanted us unalive. He wanted us dead.” While “today we are exonerated,” he said Trump still sees them as guilty: “He dismisses (the) evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will. That man thinks hate is the animating force in America. It is not.”
Echoing a 2019 miniseries about their case, he did a call and response with the audience – “One day,” “See us” – before proclaiming, “When they see us, America will finally say goodbye to that hateful man. We will say what I said after 7 long years of wrongful incarceration. Free. At last. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.”
