Donald Trump and The Central Park Five

by Jack R. Johnson 06.2024

In a long list of venalities, Donald Trump can claim one that is especially egregious. Of course, he’s bedded hookers, and then worked overtime to illegally hide the deed (which recently won him 34 felony convictions.) He has allegedly passed along state secrets to the highest bidder and lied on his tax returns. All bad, to be sure, but none of it matches what Trumped pulled in 1989. 

That year, a single white female’s body was discovered in New York City’s Central Park. Her name was Trisha Meili. She had been so badly beaten and repeatedly raped that she remained in a coma for nearly two weeks and retained no memory of the attack. According to the New York Times, she lost 75 percent of her blood, suffering a severe skull fracture, and nearly lost her left eye, among other injuries. 

The attack occurred during a particularly violent era in New York City—1,896 homicides, a record at the time, took place a year earlier in 1988—so police officers were quick to find somewhere to point the blame.

An April 21, 1989 story in the New York Daily News reported that on the night of the crime, a 30-person gang, or so-called “wolf pack” of teens launched a series of attacks nearby, including assaults on a man carrying groceries, a couple on a tandem bike, another male jogger and a taxi driver. 

Then, the News reported “at least a dozen youths grabbed the woman and dragged her off the path through heavy underbrush and trees, down a ravine toward a small body of water known as The Loch. It was there, 200 feet north of the transverse, that she was beaten and assaulted, police said. ‘They dragged her down like she was an animal,’ one police official said.”

According to New York magazine, police told reporters the teens used the word “wilding” in describing their acts and “that while in a holding cell the suspects had laughed and sung the rap hit ‘Wild Thing.’”

New York City Mayor Ed Koch called it, “the crime of the century.”

Five black and Latino teens—Antron McCray, 15; Kevin Richardson, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15; Raymond Santana, 14; and Korey Wise, 16 were picked up and arrested. They came to be known as the Central Park Five. Four of the five teens, all from Harlem confessed on videotape following hours of interrogation. The boys later recanted and pled not guilty, saying their confessions had been coerced.

“When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours,” wrote in the Washington Post years later in 2016. “Under duress, we falsely confessed. Though we were innocent, we spent our formative years in prison, branded as rapists.”

Despite inconsistencies in their stories, no eye witnesses and no DNA evidence linking them to the crime, the five were convicted in two trials in 1990. McCray, Salaam and Santana were found guilty of rape, assault, robbery and riot. Richardson was found guilty of attempted murder, rape, assault and robbery. Korey was found guilty of sexual abuse, assault and riot. They spent between six and 13 years behind bars.

At the time, the teens were depicted as symbols of violence and called “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages” and “human mutations.” The New York Post’s Pete Hamill wrote that the teens hailed “from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance…a land with no fathers…to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.”

Weeks after the attack, in May of 1989, Donald Trump decided to add his two cents to the media firestorm. He took out full-page ads in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post and New York Newsday with the headline, "Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!" 

Trump said he wanted "criminals of every age to be afraid."

“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their Civil Liberties End When an Attack On Our Safety Begins!” 

Righteous words! Only, in 2002, new DNA evidence exonerated the Central Park Five. A confession by convicted rapist Matias Reyes and related DNA evidence (notably absent from the original trial) proved that he was the lone culprit. The charges against the five men were vacated and they eventually received at $41 million dollar settlement.

According to defendant Yusef Salaam, quoted in The Guardian, Trump "was the fire starter" in 1989, as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty." Salaam said his family received death threats after papers ran Trump's full-page ad urging the death penalty. 

On Friday, a day after making history as the first U.S. president convicted of felony crimes in a court of law, Trump blasted that same criminal justice system he once cheered on, as “corrupt” and “rigged” against him.

Maya Wiley, a New York civil rights attorney and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the city’s Black and Hispanic residents do not sympathize. They remember Trump’s comments about the Central Park jogger case from decades ago.

“They haven’t forgotten the fact that Donald Trump took out a full-page ad suggesting the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who have been exonerated and were the victims of an abusive system,” Wiley said.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, an advocate for   exonerated men, called Trump’s recent conviction a symbolic measure of justice for the Central Park Five. In fact, Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions were announced in the same Court House that incorrectly convicted the Central Park Five.

“This is the same building that Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise all passed into, day after day, as they endured a show trial for a crime they did not commit,” Sharpton said just after Trump’s verdict was read, “…Now the shoe is on the other foot. Donald Trump is the criminal, and those five men are exonerated.”

Yet, as Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project Action Fund noted, “[Trump] didn’t have a violent arrest by police, he didn’t stay a night in Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford bail, he didn’t even go to jail. He could pay a battery of lawyers to represent him and he can pay for an appeal.” 

Trump's sentencing is scheduled for July 11, 2024 just four day before the GOP convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.