Former President Donald Trump is facing a defamation lawsuit from the exonerated “Central Park Five” over comments he made during last month’s presidential debate.
The lawsuit, filed in Philadelphia, says Mr. Trump’s statements were “false and defamatory in numerous respects.”
“Defendant Trump’s conduct at the September 10 debate was extreme and outrageous, and it was intended to cause severe emotional distress to Plaintiffs,” the complaint says.
During the Sept. 10 debate between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president responded to Ms. Harris talking about an ad he placed in The New York Times calling for the execution of the five men for the 1989 rape of a female jogger in Central Park.
“[T]hey come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people including Mayor Bloomberg agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” he said during the debate. “They admitted — they said, they [pleaded] guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.”
The five men — Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise — were convicted as teenagers for the 1989 rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park. They spent roughly a decade in jail until a different man confessed to the crime and DNA showed him to be telling the truth. The five were exonerated.
Mr. Trump had ads published in four New York City newspapers around the time the case was taking off, calling for the death penalty to be brought back.
The lawsuit points out that the five never pled guilty in the case and maintained their innocence their entire time in prison, and the assault victim wasn’t killed.
“Defendant Trump’s statements of or concerning Plaintiffs on September 10, 2024 were made negligently, with knowledge of their falsity and/or with reckless disregard for their falsity,” the lawsuit says.
The filing also lists several other times the former president has commented on the five men, including a 2013 tweet that bashed the documentary about their story as a “one sided piece of garbage,” and a 2014 editorial in the New York Daily News where he called the settlement between the five men and the city a “disgrace.”
“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,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
“The frantic lawfare efforts by Lyin’ Kamala’s allies to interfere in the election are going nowhere and President Trump is dominating as he marches to a historic win for the American people on November 5th,” he said.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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