A group of men who were wrongly convicted as the ‘Central Park Five’ have sued former President Donald Trump over his ‘defamatory’ comments about them at the presidential debate.
The men filed a lawsuit against the Republican candidate on Monday, saying Trump made “false and defamatory statements” about them in his confrontation with Vice President Kamala Harris last month.
They are calling for a jury trial to determine damages in a case that is once again raising tensions in a tense campaign just two weeks before Election Day.
“Defendant Trump falsely stated (in the debate) that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pleaded guilty to the crime,” the civil suit says.
“These statements are clearly false.”
Kamala Harris mentioned the Central Park Five in the debate and Donald Trump responded with comments that sparked a lawsuit.
The men who were wrongly convicted as the ‘Central Park Five’ have sued Donald Trump for defaming them in the presidential debate.
The lawsuit says the five men “never pleaded guilty to any crime and were subsequently acquitted of any wrongdoing.”
He adds: “Furthermore, the victims of the Central Park attacks were not murdered.”
The Trump campaign called the lawsuit a “frivolous” example of “election interference.”
Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were teenagers when they were accused of raping and beating a white woman who was jogging in 1989 in Central Park in New York City.
The five, who are black and Latino, said they confessed to the crimes under duress.
They later recanted, pleaded not guilty in court, and were later convicted after jury trials.
Those convictions were overturned in 2002 based on newly discovered DNA evidence.
Less than two weeks after a sexual assault on a jogger in the park for which the teens were charged, Trump paid for a full-page ad calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for those crimes.
It was one of Trump’s first anti-crime messages, which evolved into his broader populist speech to voters, America First.
During the debate, Harris raised Trump’s record with the five men, saying he “took out a full-page ad calling for his execution.”
Trump responded, in a statement that forms the basis of the lawsuit.
“They admitted, they said they pleaded guilty, and I said, ‘Well, if they pleaded guilty, they seriously hurt a person, they eventually killed a person… And they pleaded guilty, then they pleaded not guilty,'” Trump said.
He appeared to confuse the men’s confessions with guilty pleas. Additionally, no victims died.
Men’s disdain for Trump dates back to 1989, when he took out a full-page ad (pictured) in four New York City newspapers demanding that they face the death penalty for the rape of a white woman in Central Park. The five men were exonerated in 2002 after serving between six and 13 years in prison when another inmate confessed to the attack.
The trials of the alleged perpetrators of the ‘Central Park Five’ affected residents of New York City and beyond in the 1990s.
Trump’s comments were “part of an ongoing pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct dating back several years” against the men, the lawsuit says.
Her lawsuit, which alleges allegations of defamation and emotional distress, seeks damages of more than $75,000, with the total of compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, in a statement to CNBC, said it was “just another frivolous lawsuit for election interference.”
The documents were “filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’ dangerous liberal agenda and failed campaign,” Cheung added.
The lawsuit states that the men were convicted in trials of a series of assaults that occurred in Central Park in April 1989.
They were then between 14 and 16 years old and spent years behind bars after being convicted.
A year after being exonerated, the men sued New York City for false arrest, malicious prosecution and racially motivated conspiracy.
The city settled the lawsuit more than a decade later by agreeing to pay the men $41 million, a deal Trump called a “disgrace.”