The members of the Central Park Five have filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump because 35 years after their arrests and 22 years after their exoneration, Trump is still out here suggesting that they’re responsible for the rape and death of jogger Trisha Meili, who, by the way, isn’t even dead.
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You might remember that during his disastrous debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed the plaintiffs in the federal defamation lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania Monday, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, had pleaded guilty to the assault before changing their plea to not guilty, and he said they “killed a person ultimately.” As usual, the commander-in-alternative facts were wrong and/or lying about all of it.
From Forbes:
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.
Just think about that for a second: Donald Trump, in 1989, paid for a full-page advertisement to be published in four New York City newspapers calling for the state of New York to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE” in order to put to death the Central Park Five members, who were teenagers at the time. In 2014, when NYC settled a civil case with the Five for $40 million, Trump called the settlement a “disgrace.” In 2016, Trump continued to bash the settlement, saying, “The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.” In 2019, he refused to apologize for his campaign against the teens and said: “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”
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In 2024, he is still calling these men guilty. Meanwhile, he does not appear to be familiar with the most basic aspects of the case, such as the fact that the victim was not killed.
I mean, maybe Trump is just a racist-a** racist, and that’s really all there is to it.
Of course, Trump’s attorney, Steven Cheung, has responded to the lawsuit the same way Trump attorneys respond to every case brought against their orangey white nationalist client — by claiming it’s all a political move aimed at persecuting their favorite MAGA martyr.
In a statement to Forbes, Cheung called the lawsuit “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.”
(Yes, Harris’ campaign is “failing” and that’s why Trump has been sweating bullets and ducking debates against the opponent he has been neck-and-neck in the polls with since the start of her candidacy. It’s almost as if Trump’s people are paid to match his delusion.)
It’s worth mentioning that this is actually the second time Trump’s debate performance resulted in legal action being taken against him. Last month, the Haitian Bridge Alliance filed charges against Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who the organization accused of causing chaos in Springfield, Ohio, by spreading racist and xenophobic white nonsense about Haitian migrants abducting and eating people’s pets — a lie Trump repeated during the debate after he and Vance were well-informed by every state and city official involved that those claims were false.
Trump keeps proving himself to be the raging white supremacist that he is, and his followers keep pretending everyone is attacking him for no reason at all.
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Sad.