On Thursday, a federal judge declined to dismiss a lawsuit brought against President Donald Trump by the ‘Central Park Five.’ The defamation case was brought by five men who were wrongly convicted in 1989 and imprisoned. The lawsuit stems from comments that Trump made while campaigning for president in 2024. U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone ruled this week that the ‘Central Park Five,’ which includes five Black and Hispanic men, can proceed with a lawsuit against Trump.
Trump Took Out Full-Page Ads
The men, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam, known collectively as the ‘Central Park Five,’ were teenagers back in 1989 when authorities accused them of raping and beating a female jogger in Central Park located in the heart of New York City.
After the woman was attacked in Central Park, Donald Trump purchased a full-page ad in all of New York City’s newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated after the five teens were taken into custody. The teens were pressured and coerced by authorities to plead guilty, however, they later recanted their guilty pleas. However, they were still found guilty by a jury. In 2002, their convictions were vacated after DNA evidence proved that another person, who had confessed to the crime, was the guilty party.
Trump Slandered Them For Years
Even though their innocence had been proven, Trump continued for years to blame them for the heinous crime because they were intimidated into pleading guilty. “You have people on both sides of that,” Trump said to a room of journalists back in 2013. When asked if he would apologize to the men for calling for their executions, he said, “They admitted their guilt.”
Trump’s most recent comments are the ones directly responsible for the defamation lawsuit. During the presidential debate with then-Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, he spoke negatively and inaccurately about 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 they pled guilty, then they pled not guilty,” Trump said.
Central Park Five Demand Jury Trial
Trump’s claim was false because the jogger was not killed. Trump’s attorney attempted to argue that his comments were protected under the First Amendment. Judge Beetlestone was not buying it and ruled Trump’s statement “must be construed as one of fact, not opinion,” because it could be proven to be false.
“Here, Plaintiffs were not just in the process of being exonerated, their name had been cleared for over twenty years, so Defendant cannot argue that stating that they pleaded guilty to crimes is substantially true when the truth is that Plaintiffs are not guilty at all of those crimes,” she wrote.
Neither Trump’s attorney nor the White House has responded to any requests for comment on the issue. The ‘Central Park Five’ has requested a jury trial to determine an “unspecified amount of monetary damages.”
