After last month’s disastrous debate where The Felon Guy lied his ass off, rambled on about Haitians eating Springfield, Ohio residents’ pets, and defamed members of the Central Park 5, those very same members filed a defamation suit on Monday against the demented, racist, and pathetic excuse for a human being. They will seek “compensatory and punitive damages” and allege that “Trump’s comments placed them in a false light and caused them to ‘suffer severe emotional distress.’”
The suit filed in federal court states that “Trump knew he was acting with ‘reckless disregard’ for the truth when he said during the September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that they pleaded guilty to crimes connected to the beating and raping a woman in New York City, and that the five teenagers ‘badly hurt a person, killed a person’ in the attack.”
“Defendant Trump’s statements were false and defamatory in numerous respects,” attorneys for the men, now all in their 50s, wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Philadelphia. “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to the Central Park assaults. Plaintiffs all pled not guilty and maintained their innocence throughout their trial and incarceration, as well as after they were released from prison.”
“None of the victims of the Central Park assaults were killed,” the lawyers for Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise wrote.
The group was pressured into giving false confessions in the case. They were exonerated in 2002 when DNA evidence linked another person to the crime. The teenagers sued the city, and the case was settled in 2014.
“Let’s remember, this is the same individual who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five,” Harris said. “Took out a full-page ad calling for their execution.”
“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
Key Facts:
- Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam filed the claim against Trump in federal court in Pennsylvania Monday, claiming the former president defamed them, painted them in an offensive false light and intentionally inflicted emotional distress by making his claims on the national debate stage.
- In response to a comment from Vice President Kamala Harris about Trump’s lengthy history with the Central Park 5, Trump claimed during the debate the group had pleaded guilty to the assault before changing their plea to not guilty, and said they “killed a person ultimately.”
- Neither claim is true—the men never pled guilty to any crime associated with the attack and the victim, Trisha Meili, now 64, is still alive.
- The five men maintained their innocence throughout their trial, conviction and years spent in prison before they were exonerated in 2002 following the confession of convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes.
- Trump has, in claims dating back to 1989, repeatedly asserted the men are guilty of the crime and said during the 2016 presidential election, “the fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
- The lawsuit asks for an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages.
- Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director, called the complaint “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” in a statement to Forbes.
