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Inset, left to right: Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana (CBS Sunday Morning). Background: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., June 22, 2024. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)
Donald Trump implored a federal judge in Pennsylvania to toss out the defamation lawsuit filed against him by members of the Central Park Five over comments the president-elect made during last year’s presidential debate, claiming the falsely-accused quintet are portraying his “substantially true” comments out of context.
The 12-page reply motion seeking to have the suit dismissed was filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and reiterated many of Trump’s previous arguments about the case, mainly, claiming the plaintiffs rely on “misrepresentations of President-elect Trump’s arguments” that could only be defamatory if one were “reviewing the at-issue statements out of context.”
Specifically, Trump’s attorneys argue that his statements about the quintet were in response to Vice President Kamala Harris’ comments about the full-page ads Trump took out calling for their execution in the immediate aftermath of their 1989 arrests and were about his state of mind at the time.
“In direct response to this attack regarding the 1989 ad, President-elect Trump responded with several phrases that showed his statements were directly in reference to his reasoning for the 1989 ad,” the motion states. “First, President-elect Trump noted that Vice President Harris had to go back ‘many, many years’ to find material to attack him. Second, he used the phrase ‘well, I said if …,’ an indication that he was harkening back to prior reasoning rather than making present claims.”
Trump’s statements during the debate
The action centers on the following exchange between Trump and Harris during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, viewed by over 67 million people. Harris had just accused Trump of using “race to divide the American people” before referring to Trump’s ads.
Harris: “Let’s remember, this is the same individual [Trump] 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. Took out a full-page ad calling for their execution. ….”
Trump: “… They come up with things with things like she just said, going back many, many years, when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five. 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. But this is a person that has to stretch back years, forty, fifty years ago, because there is nothing now. ….”
The lawsuit
According to plaintiffs Antron Brown, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam, Trump’s comments were “demonstrably false.”
“Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing,” the lawsuit said. “Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”
Trump’s Wednesday reply motion
Trump on Wednesday argued that no “reasonable listener” (the standard for defamation claims) would come away from hearing the president-elect’s full statement believing that the plaintiffs really did what Trump said.
“A ‘reasonable listener’ hearing the statements in their full context would never come away with the impression that President-elect Trump was making a present assertion that Plaintiffs ‘pled guilty’ and ‘killed a person,”” the motion states. “Further, he did not dispute Vice-President Harris’s claims of innocence, and, in fact, followed up his own statement that they ‘pled guilty’ with a qualifier that they then pled ‘not guilty.’ No reasonable listener would interpret the statements as Plaintiffs suggest.”
Trump also argued that “his challenged statements were substantially true,” asserting that when he said the plaintiffs “pled guilty” and “ultimately killed a person,” those remarks would have virtually the same effect on the average person as the truth. Trump reasoned that while the men never formally pleaded guilty, they did initially confess to police (under duress).
Similarly, while the victim, Patricia Meili, survived the attack (and is still alive today), Trump said she was left “virtually dead” and “in a coma.”
“As to the attack on Ms. Meili, the proper comparison is whether, in the mind of a listener, an accused’s initial admission to a beating that ultimately left a victim dead would be substantially the same as an initial admission to a beating that left a victim ‘virtually dead,’” the motion states. “Here too, there would not be a ‘different effect’ on the listener’s mind between the two statements because, in either case, the listener would understand the accused to have admitted to a vicious, murderous beating before recanting.”
Backstory of the Central Park Five
In 1989, the then-teenagers were wrongly accused of raping Trisha Meili as she jogged in Central Park. The five were also accused of attacking two men that same night.
“While in police custody, Plaintiffs were each separately subjected to hours of coercive interrogation, under duress, with no attorney present and often without a parent or guardian present,” the lawsuit recounted. “Plaintiffs all initially denied having any knowledge of the Central Park assaults. However, after hours of interrogation, four of the Plaintiffs agreed to provide written and videotaped statements in which they falsely admitted to having been present during the assaults.”
From there, the Central Park Five faced trials, maintained their innocence, were convicted by juries in 1990 and were sent to prison, only to be exonerated decades later after the real attacker, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime against Meili and DNA “conclusively” proved that Reyes was the “true perpetrator,” court documents said.
“In fact, Plaintiffs were not involved in the assaults in any way, and their statements were the product of coercion and duress,” the lawsuit said. “Plaintiffs all recanted their coerced statements shortly after their interrogations.”
The Central Park Five were ultimately exonerated, their convictions were vacated, and New York City went on to settle a lawsuit for $41 million
