A judge has refused to dismiss a defamation case against President Donald Trump brought by the so-called Central Park Five, Newsweek reported. Trump repeated accusations about the men Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, who had their 1989 conviction overturned decades later.
The group was convicted of brutally raping Central Park jogger Trisha Meili after offering their confessions to police. The initial crime made headlines for its brutality among those allegedly involved, as did their later dismissal.
Trump, a New Yorker, was incensed over the crime and urged the city to "bring back the death penalty" in a full-page New York Daily News ad at the time. Trump doubled down on them during his 2016 campaign, though by then, the courts had already overturned their conviction.
Trump said that "they admitted they were guilty" and "the police doing the original investigation say they were guilty." Trump made similar remarks again in the 2024 election during a debate with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
During the debate, Harris goaded Trump about the full-page ad to smear his tough-on-crime image. "They come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five," Trump pointed out.
He said the five men "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," Trump incorrectly recalled.
Based on these statements, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that she would not dismiss the case on the grounds that he was sharing an opinion. Because Trump's statements "can be 'objectively determined' to be false," his claims "must be construed as one of fact, not opinion," the judge wrote in her decision.
"The Defendant, in his briefs, urges the Court to contextualize the statement as a response to Harris's statement sixty seconds before and to interpret the statement as his recollections of why he placed the 1989 ad. Before addressing that point, however, as an initial matter it is necessary to determine exactly on what portions of the statement Plaintiffs premise their claims," Beetlestone went on.
"Given that Defendant's communications were reasonably capable of conveying the particular meaning ascribed to them by the plaintiff, the next question is 'whether that meaning is defamatory in character,'" she later added. The only point Beetlestone gave to Trump was that the plaintiffs did not prove they endured "severe emotional distress and reputation damage" from his statements.
Although the Central Park Five had their case dismissed, conservative commentator Ann Coulter believes there are more questions about their involvement. In her October 2024 substack post, Coulter contended that this lawsuit might actually be a net negative for them.
"I'm not sure the Central Park Five really want a civil trial on what happened the night of April 19, 1989, but by suing Donald Trump for defamation, that's what they're going to get," she wrote. Coulter pointed out that many troubling facts were never explained away despite the dismissal.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to prove the truth in a court of law! They asked for it," She added. Coulter made the case that the accused then-teenagers admitted to being in the park, and some even admitted they had a role in victimizing Meili.
Their confessions were videotaped, with some of the boys' parents present, before Meili had even awoken from a coma. "Weren't the detectives worried that if they bullied five innocent boys into making false confessions, the jogger might suddenly emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers? What if she woke up and blurted out, “My boyfriend did it!”?" Coulter pointed out.
The fact that this case will continue on may shed some light on what really happened that night. If nothing else, it's another chance for Trump to clear his name against people who have tried anything they can to get to him.
