A group of men formerly known as the Central Park Five filed a defamation suit against Donald Trump on Monday, October 22. The men alleged that the Republican Presidential nominee made “false and defamatory statements” about them during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris last month. The group has now urged a jury trial to determine compensatory and punitive damages.
“Defendant Trump falsely stated that plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the group wrote in the federal complaint, reported The Mirror.
The men have alleged that the former president essentially “defamed them in front of 67 million people, which has caused them to seek to clear their names all over again,” co-lead counsel Shanin Specter told The Associated Press. “We are seeking redress in the courts,” Specter said.
Meanwhile, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that the suit was “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.”
The ‘Central Park Five’ case
The Central Park Five – Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise – were in their teens when they were accused of raping and beating a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. The five men are Black and Latino. They said they confessed to the brutal crime under duress.
However, the group later pleaded not guilty in court. While they were convicted after a jury trial, the convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to have committed the crime.
Trump went on to purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times following the crime, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. Many at the time believed that the former president’s ad was akin to calling for the teens to be executed.
When vice president Harris brought up the case during the September 10 debate, Trump reportedly misstated key facts. “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 they pled guilty, then they pled not guilty,” Trump said, appearing to be confusing guilty pleas with confessions. Notably, no victim was killed in the incident.
The exonerated men have been campaigning for Harris. Some of them even spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, blasting Trump for never having apologised for the ad.
