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PHILADELPHIA (CN) — Five Black and Latino men who were wrongfully convicted as teenagers and later exonerated in the “Central Park Five” rape case sued former President Donald Trump on Monday, accusing him of making false and defamatory statements about them during the September presidential debate.
In the suit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania two weeks before Election Day — the five men claim Trump knew he was lying or acting in “reckless disregard” during the Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris during which he stated that they had pleaded guilty to killing a woman in New York City.
“Defendant Trump falsely stated that plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime,” the men say in their lawsuit. “These statements are demonstrably false.”
Trump has long been connected to the Central Park Five case, in which the five men — then boys aged 14 to 16 — said they were coerced by police into giving false confessions surrounding the 1989 attack and rape of a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. All five recanted within weeks, pleaded not guilty in court, and were convicted the following year. All five men were exonerated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.
Shortly after the assault, Trump — then best known as a real estate magnate — purchased a full-page ad in several New York City newspapers, alluding to the Central Park Five as guilty and calling for an iron-fist response by law enforcement.
“Send a message loud and clear to those who would murder our citizens and terrorize New York — BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” the ad read.
During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Harris referenced the advertisement during a segment on race and politics in the U.S., attacking Trump for “calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent.”
In response, Trump defended his ad, making several inaccurate statements about the five men, now in their 50s.
“They come up with things like what she just said, going back many, many years when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” Trump replied. “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, ‘We’re not guilty.’”
In the suit, the five men note that they never pleaded guilty to the Central Park assault and have maintained their innocence since recanting their confessions in 1989, and that no victim in the attack was killed.
The five men also noted that Michael Bloomberg did not become mayor of New York until 2002, adding that then-mayor Ed Koch vocally opposed Trump’s call for the death penalty to be used against minors.
The five men seek compensatory and punitive damages of over $225,000.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung derided the lawsuit as “just another frivolous, election interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’ dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
This isn’t the only defamation suit Trump has faced in recent years. In January, a jury found the former president should pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for mocking and dismissing her after she accused him of raping her decades earlier. A separate jury found Trump guilty in May 2023 of sexually abusing Carroll and awarded her $5 million.
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