United States – Five Black and Hispanic teenage men who were exonerated in 2014 for the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, New York, in 1989 are now suing Donald Trump for defamation for comments he made in the American presidential debate in October.
The Background
Well known today as The Central Park Five, the defendants served between 5 and 13 years of their time before being exonerated in 2002 on the strength of new DNA evidence and the lead defendant’s fresh confession from another individual, as reported by Reuters.
Trump, who was a Republican nominee to be president, has been known to lie, and in the Sept. 10 debate with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, he was lying again when he said that the Central Park Five had killed a person and pleaded guilty.
Exoneration and Trump’s False Remarks
The legal complaint was filed last week at the federal court of Philadelphia, but a representative of Trump’s campaign did not answer an inquiry about the case.
The lawsuit by Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise accused Trump of telling the truth and described his statements as “demonstrably false.”
Shanin Specter, a lawyer for the men, said in a statement that Trump, speaking negatively about them, casts them in a deleterious false light and shoehorned them deliberately with emotional distress.
The plaintiffs are asking for money that they cannot quantify for damages to their reputation, emotional distress, and punitive damages.
Some of the other controversies which Trump has previously faced are his statements regarding the ‘Central Park Five’. After he was attacked while jogging, he publicly addressed the case and placed an advertisement in several New York papers demanding the death penalty be brought back.
Trump’s Controversial History
Trump filed a motion in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in September to vacate a $5 million judgment entered against him for sexually assaulting and libeling Carroll, the writer whose book accuses him of the conduct, as reported by Reuters.
Another jury in January made Mr Trump pay Carroll 83.3m dollars for having given her a raw deal after she accused him of rape in June 2019.