President Donald Trump must face a defamation lawsuit from five men who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a 1989 rape after a federal judge declined Thursday to dismiss the case.
U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone ruled that the five innocent Black and Hispanic men ― known as the “Central Park Five” ― could pursue legal action against Trump for comments he made during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The five men, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, were teens in 1989 when they were falsely accused of raping and beating a white woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park.
Trump took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers that year calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following the arrests of the five teens.
All five initially pleaded guilty under pressure from authorities, but they later recanted their pleas. They were still convicted by a jury, but those convictions were vacated in 2002 after DNA evidence matched another person who confessed to the crime.
Despite their innocence, over the years Trump has continued to blame them for the crime because they pleaded guilty under duress.
“You have people on both sides of that,” Trump told reporters in 2019 when asked if he would apologize to the men for calling for their executions. “They admitted their guilt.”
But it was Trump’s most recent comments in 2024 that led to the lawsuit. In a Sept. 10 presidential debate with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump again equated pleading guilty under duress with confessing to a crime.
“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 they pled guilty, then they pled not guilty,” Trump said.
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The jogger was not “killed” as Trump falsely claimed.
In a December court filing, Trump’s lawyers argued he was protected under the First Amendment. But Beetlestone disagreed in her ruling Thursday, saying Trump’s statement “must be construed as one of fact, not opinion,” because it can be “objectively determined” to be false that the men killed someone.
The group is asking for a jury trial to determine unspecified monetary damages.