The Central Park Five: Trump's Decades-Long Targeting of Wrongfully Convicted Black and Brown Teenagers

Overview

The Central Park Five case spans three decades of Trump's public life — from aggressive incitement before trial in 1989, through the convictions and the exonerations, to his ongoing refusal as president to accept the documented truth of the men's innocence.

In April 1989, a woman was brutally raped in Central Park. Five teenagers — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, all Black or Latino and between the ages of 14 and 16 — were arrested and questioned for hours without their parents present. They gave false confessions that they later said were coerced, and which contained details about the crime they could not have known without police coaching. The DNA found at the scene matched none of them.

The Ads

Before the five teenagers had been tried or convicted, Donald Trump purchased $85,000 in full-page advertising space in all four major New York newspapers to publish a statement calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. The ad read, in part: "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!"

Though the ad did not name the teenagers, it was explicitly responsive to the Central Park case and appeared in the weeks immediately after their arrest, while the city was gripped by intense, racially charged media coverage of the attack.

The Exoneration and Trump's Response

In 2002, the actual perpetrator, Matias Reyes — a convicted serial rapist and murderer who was already incarcerated — confessed to the attack alone. DNA evidence confirmed his account. All five convictions were vacated.

New York City settled the wrongful conviction lawsuit for $41 million in 2014.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he was asked about the settlement. He called it "a disgrace" and said "the police were right." He made no mention of the exonerations.

When asked again as president in 2019 — following the release of Ava DuVernay's documentary When They See Us, which dramatized the case and renewed widespread public attention — Trump said "you have people on both sides of that" and declined to apologize.

Significance

The Central Park Five case is documented as one of the most prominent examples in modern American history of a private citizen using money and media access to inflame public sentiment against young men of color who had not been convicted of any crime, contributing to a climate in which their coerced confessions were accepted without scrutiny. Trump's subsequent refusal to acknowledge their exoneration — even after decades, even after DNA evidence, even after a $41 million city settlement — is itself a documented record.