CHICAGO — Four of the exonerated members of the so-called Central Park Five — a group of five teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a jogger — appeared Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention, warning of what a second Donald Trump presidency could bring.
“Thirty-five years ago, my friends and I were in prison for a crime we did not commit,” one of them, Korey Wise, said Thursday. “Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into a courtroom, people screamed at us, threatening us because of Donald Trump.”
Their concerns about the former president stemmed from personal experience and go back more than three decades: In 1989, five teenagers, all Black or Latino, were arrested after a jogger was found brutally sexually assaulted and tied up in Central Park.
One of them, then-15-year-old Yusef Salaam, would later recount how police used questionable methods, including depriving the teens of food and sleep, to get them to falsely confess to the crime “under duress.” Though all would later recant their confessions and there was no evidence linking them to the rape, the teens became publicly branded as the Central Park Five, were wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.
During their trial, Trump, already a prominent figure in New York City for his real estate dealings, took out full-page ads in four newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated.
“I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump stated in the ads. “They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”
It wasn’t until 2002, when DNA evidence confirmed a different man’s confession that he had raped the Central Park jogger, that authorities dropped charges against the Central Park Five. The group became referred to as “the Exonerated Five” and in 2014 reached a $41 million wrongful-conviction settlement with New York City. Salaam, a Democrat, won election in November to the New York City Council.
But Trump would never apologize to the group for taking out the newspaper ads or for his public antagonism toward the teens in 1989. During his 2020 presidential campaign, three decades later, Trump continued to call into question the group’s innocence.
“You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt … some of the prosecutors think the city should never have settled that case, and we’ll leave it at that,” Trump said in 2019.
On Thursday, the fourth and final night of the Democratic convention, Salaam and Wise stood on stage with two others of the Central Park Five who had been exonerated: Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson.
“He wanted us dead,” Salaam said, referring to Trump but avoiding using his name. “Today we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed and DNA ruled. That guy still says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will.”
It was not the first time Salaam has warned what a Trump presidency could mean. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Salaam publicly spoke out about his concerns that Trump had only doubled down on his actions toward the Central Park Five, even after the group was exonerated.
“For 27 years, I’ve been in Donald Trump’s crosshairs,” Salaam wrote in an October 2016 op-ed for The Washington Post, recounting the fear and confusion he felt in 1989 when he and his friends were wrongfully arrested in the case. Those terrified feelings were only magnified when they learned that Trump had called for them to face the death penalty in full-page newspaper ads.
“He called for blood in the most public way possible,” Salaam wrote then. “… I don’t know why the future Republican nominee bought those ads, but it seems part and parcel with his racist attitudes.”
Trump, he added, never apologized for calling for their deaths.
“In fact, he’s somehow still convinced that we belong in prison. When the Republican nominee was recently asked about the Central Park Five, he said, ‘They admitted they were guilty.’ … It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong,” Salaam wrote.
On Thursday, Salaam urged the crowd to throw their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in November.
Trump “thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote. In fact, it is a human right. So let us use it … and together, on November 5, we will usher in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz into the White House.”