By Damenica Ellis
Michael Nagle/The New York Times/Redux (L-R) Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise, all of whom served prison sentences after being wrongly convicted in the Central Park jogger case, pictured in New York in 2012.
During the 2024 presidential debate, on Sept. 10, Donald Trump made false statements about the Central Park Five.
Vice President Kamala Harris stated that Trump has a history of causing racial division in America, mentioning his involvement in the 1989 Central Park Five case in New York City.
“Let’s remember,” Harris said. “This is the same individual 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.” Trump also took out full-page ads in the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday calling for the execution of the five minors with the headline: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
“A lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” Trump said during the presidential debate with Harris. “They admitted. They pled guilty. And I said, well if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.”
Let’s start with the fact that the case involving the assault and rape of Trisha Meili was not a murder case, as Trump said during the debate. Meili was found unconscious in Central Park on the morning of April 20, 1989. Meili sustained life-threatening injuries and fell into a coma. She survived and later wrote a memoir about the crime and is still alive today.
The second false claim from Trump was that the Central Park Five –Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise pled guilty.
The Central Park Five first gave a coerced confession to the rape of Meili after over 24 hours of mistreatment including food and sleep deprivation. Following their false confession, “the boys later recanted and plead not guilty,” according to History.com. Salaam wrote that he and the other boys confessed under duress in a Washington Post article.
“In two trials, in 1990, Santana, Wise, Richardson, McCray, and Salaam were convicted of the attack, even though there was no physical evidence tying them to it, only their supposed confessions, which contradicted one another. They were sentenced to terms of between five and fifteen years,” the New Yorker wrote.
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. A sixth teenager was also arrested for this crime. An article by the Associated Press states that Steven Lopez, unlike the others, reached a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to robbing a male jogger the same night the assault on Meili occurred.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that Lopez pleaded guilty involuntarily, according to the Associated Press.
In 2002, Matias Reyes was found to be the offender through a DNA match with evidence at the crime scene. He confessed to the assault and rape of Meili.
