In the image from CBS Sunday Morning, we see Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana from left to right. The background shows Donald Trump speaking at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC on June 22, 2024. The photo credit goes to Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP.
The Central Park Five are urging a federal judge in Pennsylvania not to throw out a defamation lawsuit the group filed against Donald Trump over comments he made during the presidential debate earlier this year, arguing the remarks were the culmination of a three-decade “harassment campaign” waged by the president-elect against the falsely-accused quintet.
In a court filing opposing Trump’s motion to have the suit dismissed, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that Trump’s attempts to “re-frame” his statements as “opinion” and “hyperbolic political rhetoric” were unconvincing.
Thursday’s 38-page response from the plaintiffs quickly highlighted that it was only days after they were arrested and falsely accused of committing a series of brutal assaults that Trump took out a full-page advertisement in five New York City newspapers calling for the then-juveniles to be executed.
“Defendant declared in this Ad that he ‘hate[s]’ Plaintiffs and ‘always will,’ he wants them to ‘suffer,’ and he is ‘looking to punish them,”” the filing states. “In the years since, Defendant has waged a personal vendetta against Plaintiffs, unleashing a torrent of hateful and false statements about them in newspapers, on television, on social media, and even from the White House lawn. This harassment campaign culminated at the September 10, 2024 presidential debate, where Defendant told an audience of over 67 million Americans that Plaintiffs ‘pled guilty’ to having ‘killed a person.’”
According to the filing, Trump’s claim that many of his statements were “substantially true” is also unconvincing, because all of the plaintiffs pleaded not guilty in the case and none of the victims died as a result of the attacks committed by a different person. The plaintiffs also argued against Trump’s “substantial truth” argument using his own words from a recent filing in his own defamation case against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos.
Trump’s debate comments
The exchange in question occurred when Harris said that throughout his life and career, Trump has “attempted to use race to divide the American people.” One of the examples she provided was the full-page ad he placed in The New York Times and elsewhere in 1989 “calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent — the Central Park Five.”
In response to Harris, Trump said “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.”
“They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” he said. “And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”
These words, the complaint said, were “demonstrably false.”
“Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed,” the lawsuit said.
In his motion to dismiss, Trump argued it was “beyond dispute” that his debate comments constituted speech on “matters of public concern,” particularly crime, punishment, policing, and “face and politics in this country.”
Trump also argued that his statements do not amount to defamation, because he was merely explaining his rationale for taking out ads, saying it was “about crime and punishment.” The president-elect further asserted that his remarks could not be defamatory because they were “substantially true,” because the difference between formally pleading guilty to a crime in court and “admitting guilt” is merely a technicality.
“Plaintiffs allege that President-elect Trump defamed them by stating that they had ‘pled’ guilty to the Central Park Assaults in 1989, when in fact, Plaintiffs had ‘admitted’ guilt in connection with the assaults,” the motion states. “In other words, Plaintiffs object to the technically incorrect use of the criminal law term ‘pled.’ But an assertion that Plaintiffs initially ‘pled’ guilty instead of ‘admitting’ guilt is precisely the type of technical inaccuracy in the inherently complicated context of criminal law that ‘cannot be the basis of a defamation claim.’”
In arguing that Trump’s comments were not opinions, the plaintiffs asserted that “whether someone ‘pled guilty’ to having ‘killed someone’ is a factual statement that can be proven true or false.”
The filing also maligned Trump for claiming his statements had to be opinions based on the rationale that “a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five.” Trump reasoned that “as a matter of practical language, people do not ‘agree’ with facts; they agree with opinions.”
“Defendant does not cite any cases for the startling proposition that a defamatory statement can be converted into non-actionable opinion simply by adding ‘a lot of people agree with me,’ and his position does not reflect Pennsylvania law,” the filing states. “Defendant is not relieved from liability if other people believe his statements are true or he heard them from other people.”
Plaintiffs also took issue with the claim that one can only agree to an opinion, saying it is a “verifiable fact” that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon on July 21, 1969, but noting that some people still believe the moon landing never happened.
Plaintiffs also argued that Trump claiming his comments were “substantially true” is an issue for a jury that should not be addressed on a motion to dismiss, using Trump’s own words against him.
In Trump’s recent lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and ABC, Trump accused the anchor and network of defaming him after Stephanopoulos said multiple times on air that Trump had been found “liable for rape.”
According to plaintiffs, when ABC moved to dismiss the lawsuit, Trump responded as follows in his opposition brief:
“[ABC’s] attempt to dispel the notion that ‘rape’ has a far more serious connotation than ‘sexual assault’ is unfounded, unsupported, and requires a fact-specific analysis not properly conducted at this stage of the proceedings … Through the Motion, Defendants are improperly asking this Court to determine, at the motion to dismiss stage, what the ‘stigma’ or ‘gist’ associated with Stephanopoulos’ statements may or may not be. The Court cannot make this determination at this stage “[b]ecause the trier of fact must consider the context of the publication in determining whether the gist or sting associated with it differs from the actual truth.”
