The Central Park Five, who now call themselves the Exonerated Five, are taking Donald Trump to court. In a federal lawsuit filed Monday, the five men accuse Trump of acting with "reckless disregard" for the truth and making "false and defamatory" statements during his debate with Kamala Harris last month, CNN reports. The five Black and Latino men were teenagers when they were wrongfully convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park. The lawsuit says Trump claimed during the debate "that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false."
"Plaintiffs all pled not guilty and maintained their innocence throughout their trial and incarceration, as well as after they were released from prison," the lawsuit states. "Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed." The five men spent years in prison after their convictions in 1990 but they were exonerated in 2002 based on DNA evidence, CNBC reports. When New York City reached a $41 million settlement with the men in 2014, Trump called it a "disgrace." The lawsuit states that Trump's behavior at the debate "was part of a continuing pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct dating back several years, thus constituting a continuing tort."
Trump spoke about the men during the debate when Harris brought up a full-page ad Trump placed in newspapers in 1989, at a time when the case dominated headlines. She said he was "calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent." The ad didn't specifically mention the Central Park Five, but it said, "I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer, and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes," the BBC reports. In response to Harris, Trump said, "They admitted—they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately." (More Central Park Five stories.)
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