Another Day, Another Defamation Lawsuit

In this case it's the Central Park Five, innocent teens railroaded into prison for a crime that they do is not commit.

You may recall that Donald Trump bought full page advertisements calling for them to be put to death.

He had never apologized for this, even after the kids were exonerated.

They are now suing Trump for defamation over comments that he made about them during his debate with Kamala Harris.

A group of men who were exonerated in the rape and assault of a woman in Central Park in 1989 have sued Donald Trump for continuing to suggest that they are guilty, including at the presidential debate in Philadelphia last month.

The Central Park Five alleged in a federal defamation lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that Trump falsely claimed during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris that the men pleaded guilty after being charged in the case as teenagers and that they had killed someone. The defendants in fact were cleared of wrongdoing. And the victim of the infamous attack suffered life-threatening injuries but survived.

At the time of the crime, Trump took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for a return of the death penalty in New York, a move widely seen as a reaction to the attack on the jogger, directed at those who had committed the assault.

After a re-investigation of the case and after another suspect’s DNA confirmed his involvement, the defendants, who were Black and Latino, were cleared of wrongdoing. By then, they had served years in prison.

......

The new lawsuit stems from Trump’s comments at the debate, which was watched by 67 million people on Sept. 10, according to court papers.

In a portion of the debate focused on race and politics, Harris, the Democratic nominee, said she wanted to remind voters that Trump had taken out the newspaper ad suggesting the perpetrators of the jogger attack should face the death penalty.

Trump issued a muddled response, first suggesting that the teens pleaded guilty before he seemingly backtracked.

“They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” Trump said. “And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”

We are incredibly lucky that Trump is so incredibly stupid.