Central Park Five Sue Trump for Defamation

Members of the ECentral Park Five have filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump alleging the former president repeatedly made “false and defamatory statements” about the men, “negligently, knowing they were false, and/or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity.” 

According to a civil complaint filed on Monday the five men — New York City Council Member  Yusef Salaam, Antron Brown (formerly Antron McCray,) Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise — are suing Trump over statements made during his presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris in September. The five men, also known as the Exonerated Five, were wrongfully convicted for the rape and assault of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, when they were teenagers. Their convictions were overturned more than a decade later after DNA evidence proved the true identity of the perpetrator. 

The case against the Central Park Five, which was built on circumstantial evidence and racial profiling, drew national attention at the time of the assault. Trump infamously paid for full-page advertisements in New York City papers demanding the death penalty for the perpetrators. Despite the exoneration of the five men, Trump has continued to malign them and insinuate that they were responsible for the attack. 

“At the September 10, 2024 presidential debate, Defendant Trump falsely stated that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false. 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 filing reads.  

During the debate, Harris mentioned Trump’s call for the death penalty inthe case. The former president responded by stating that “a lot of people including Mayor 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 not guilty.”

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The filing notes Trump’s long record of public attacks against the men, including after they were officially declared innocent of the attack. In 2012, Trump bashed a documentary about the case by filmmaker Ken Burns, calling it “a one sided piece of garbage that didn’t explain the horrific crimes of these young men while in park.” The attacks continued throughout Trump’s presidency. In 2019, he asserted that the men had “admitted their guilt,” and expressed his belief that “the City should never have settled that case.” 

The five men are seeking an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages from the former president, who has been using his position to torment them for decades.