‘Central Park Five’ file defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump over debate comments

The five men who comprised the “Central Park Five” (and now call themselves the ‘Exonerated Five’) have filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, accusing him of spreading “false, misleading and defamatory” statements about their 1989 case during the Sept. 10 presidential debate. The lawsuit states: “Defendant Trump’s conduct at the September 10 debate was extreme and outrageous, and it was intended to cause severe emotional distress to Plaintiffs.”

According to a new court filing filed on Monday in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Trump said that the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — pleaded guilty when they were tried in connection with the assault and rape of a woman who had been running in Central Park on April 19, 1989, and that the victim had died.

During the debate, Trump responded to a statement from Vice President Kamala Harris in which she revisited his full-page ad in The New York Times in the wake of the incident that called for the execution of the Central Park Five when he said the following: “[T]hey come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people including Mayor [Michael] 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.”

However despite Trumps statements, the five men (who were then teenagers) accused of the crime always maintained their innocence, despite being convicted and serving years in prison. A decade after the attack, a different man confessed to the crime which was confirmed through DNA analysis, and the men’s convictions were vacated in 2002. Wise (who was still in prison at the time) was released early and the group went on to sue New York City in 2003. Ten years later the suit finally settled for $41 million, while the city never admitted to any misconduct by its police department or prosecutors.

Attorneys representing the five men are seeking monetary damages over Trump’s statements, which they say have caused them “severe emotional distress and reputational damage.” Shanin Specter, an attorney for the five, said Monday: “Unfortunately the civil justice system doesn’t permit us to require Mr. Trump to apologize or retract his statement. The most that we can obtain are money damages both to compensate these five men for Mr. Trump’s damaging their reputations and for punishment of Mr. Trump for making these statements.”

In response to the lawsuit, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, said Monday: “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.”

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