On Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s Wolf, journalist Miguel Marquez looked back at the case of the Central Park Five, a group of New York teenagers who were convicted of assaulting and raping a female jogger in 1989. At the time of their arrest, Donald Trump led the charge against the Central Park Five, even taking out full-page ads in New York papers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated.
Though DNA evidence exonerated the men in 2002, Trump wouldn’t back down. When the men were awarded a $41 million settlement by the city in 2014, the reality TV star said in an op-ed that the settlement was a “disgrace.” He wrote, “settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels … It is politics at its lowest and worst form.”
In fact, the Republican nominee for president still maintains that the Central Park Five are guilty, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. In a statement to CNN, Trump not only refused to apologize for his rabid pursuit of the Central Park Five, but said: “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
In an interview Marquez, Yusuf Salaam, one of the five teens who were arrested in 1989, said that he is still holding out some small hope that one day Trump will apologize for his role in persecuting the Central Park Five. “I keep saying to myself, one day Donald Trump is going to perhaps take a full-page ad out and apologize to the Central Park Five,” he said. “You know, that would be tremendous.”
(Via Media Matters)