Five men wrongfully convicted of assaulting and raping a woman in New York’s Central Park in 1989 have sued former President Donald Trump for defamation over comments he made in a debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last month.
Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise, initially known as the “Central Park Five” and, later, the “Exonerated Five,” accused Trump in a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania of making “false, misleading and defamatory” statements about their case at the debate.
The five men were convicted of the attack and sentenced to multiple years in prison. Their convictions were vacated in 2002, more than a decade later, after a serial rapist confessed to the attack, and DNA evidence confirmed he was involved. They sued the city the next year, accusing the city of false arrest, a racially motivated conspiracy to deprive them of their civil rights and a malicious prosecution, and they settled the case in 2014.
At one point during last month’s debate, Harris condemned Trump for taking out a full-page ad in all four of the city’s major newspapers in the aftermath of the attack calling for the return of the death penalty. Trump fired back by saying that Harris and other opponents had "to stretch back years” to come up with lines of attack against him, before falsely saying that the five men pleaded guilty and killed someone.
“[T]hey come up with things like what she just said, going back many, many years, when a lot of people including [former New York] Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” Trump 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 five men did not plead guilty in the case, nor was the victim of the attack killed — as the lawsuit points out, while also pointing out that Ed Koch, not Bloomberg, was mayor at the time of the attack.
“These statements are demonstrably false,” the complaint says, calling Trump’s rhetoric “extreme and outrageous” and charging that he “intended to cause severe emotional distress to Plaintiffs.”
The Trump campaign has not responded to a request for comment from Spectrum News. A spokesperson for the former president’s campaign called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement to NBC News.
According to the lawsuit, Salaam — now a New York City Council member — attempted to engage with Trump after the debate in the spin room. People asked Trump if he would "apologize to the Exonerated Five," and after he didn’t respond, Salaam introduced himself to the former president.
“Ah, so you’re on my side them,” Trump said, per the lawsuit.
“No no no, I’m not on your side,” Salaam replied to Trump, who smiled, waved and walked away, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit also makes note of other statements Trump has made about the case, including posts on his Twitter account from 2013 and a New York Daily News op-ed from 2014 calling the city’s settlement with the men a “disgrace.”
The defendants are asking for “compensatory damages, for punitive damages and for costs, in an as yet unliquidated sum in excess of $75,000,” and asked for a jury trial to determine that figure.