(PHOTO : GETTY IMAGES)
The men of The Exonerated ‘Central Park Five’ have come together to take legal action against Donald Trump after recent comments he made in continuing to suspect them of a crime that they had been wrongfully accused and cleared of decades ago!
Trump’s comments occurred during the presidential debate last month against Vice President Kamala Harris when asked about his surrounding history with the Exonerated Five. In response, Trump declared the teens at the time had pleaded guilty to the brutal 1989 incident and later changed their stories to not guilty.
“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 if they pled guilty—-then they pled were not guilty.”
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise all pleaded not guilty during the trial. The attacked jogger had also survived.
The issued complaint states that Trump’s statements are, “demonstrably false.”
“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 complaint also indicates that the now 50-year-olds have “suffered injuries as a result of Defendant Trump’s false and defamatory statements.”
As teenagers, the five young males were indicted despite maintaining their innocence and were later incarcerated. They were previously charged with assault of the female jogger as additional robberies and further crimes were committed in Central Park that evening on April 19, 1989.
During their trial Trump who was considered a real estate mogul at the time had taken out ads in newspapers advocating for New York to bring back the death penalty, reports NBC.
They spent years in prison until 2002 after DNA evidence linked a serial rapist to the attack. The five men were fully exonerated and received a $41 million legal settlement from the city.
Sources state that the defamation suit was filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania noting that New York City Council member Yusef Salaam was present for the debate when Trump made the comments.
“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,” said Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.
On Monday, the attorney for the five men Shanin Specter stated, “Unfortunately the civil justice system doesn’t permit us to require Mr. Trump to apologize or retract his statement. The most that we can obtain are money damages both to compensate these five men for Mr. Trump’s damaging their reputations and for punishment of Mr. Trump for making these statements.”
Shanin expressed that it would be helpful for Trump to issue a public apology however, “we are not holding our breath for that.”
+ There are no comments
Add yours