The five Black and Latino men once known as the Central Park Five are taking Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to court.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday in Pennsylvania, the five men – who now go by the “Exonerated Five” – accuse Trump of defamation for remarks he made during his Sept. 10 debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
“They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilt, they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” Trump said at the time when called out by Harris for infamously taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty.
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Antron Brown, and Kevin Richardson accused Trump of falsely stating that they committed murder and pled guilty to the crime.
“These statements are demonstrably false. [The] plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed,” the lawsuit states.
The legal filing claims that the men, who were convicted as teenagers in1989, have suffered injuries as a result of Trump’s “false and defamatory statements” and are seeking redress for the alleged harm caused.
“What defamation lawsuits do is say you’re not going to lie on me. You’re not going to demean me and my character or the circumstance that I am facing,” said Jamarr Brown, who runs the campaign arm of the civil rights organization Color of Change.
Brown told theGrio that the lawsuit is an important tool to hold Trump accountable in the courts — something he has often evaded throughout his decades-long business and political careers.
“He has operated really unruly and unhinged without a lot of accountability,” Brown pointed out.
In the past year, accountability appears to be catching up to Trump. Not only has he been found guilty of business fraud in New York, but he was criminally convicted for falsifying business records in a scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election. The former president was also found liable for the sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Trump for defamation, resulting in him being ordered to pay her nearly $90 million in damages.
Brown notes that Trump has a track record of lying about women and people of color.
“We’re seeing that now when he’s talking about Haitians and how he accuses them of eating people’s pets or when he talks about Kamala Harris, in a way, because she’s a woman,” he said.
Brown said Trump “played a huge role” in the Central Park Five’s convictions, of which they were exonerated in 2002 due to DNA evidence and a confession from the actual perpetrator.
“Ultimately, I think that these folks deserve justice, and part of that justice is ensuring that Donald Trump is not continuing to perpetuate lies about them and other Black people.”
Mandela Barnes, a senior fellow at People For the American Way and former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, said the Exonerated Five “should get every penny they deserve.”
Reflecting on Trump’s call for them to be executed, Barnes said the five then-teens were “effectively used as, even at that point in time, a stepping stone on the way to his presidency.”
“He stepped over so many people, so many different communities, to serve his own interests,” added Barnes. “This dude needs to pay the price.”
