President-elect Donald Trump has filed a motion to try to toss out the lawsuit against him by the exonerated "Central Park Five" — the group of five Black and Latino men who were initially convicted of a brutal rape in New York City in the late 1980s but later cleared as innocent.
The defamation suit was filed in October, after Trump — who initially responded to the case by taking out a massive pro-death penalty ad in the papers — doubled down on claiming it was reasonable to infer their guilt during the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
"A lot of people including Mayor Bloomberg agreed with me on the Central Park Five," said Trump in the debate, despite the fact that Ed Koch was the mayor at the time, not Michael Bloomberg. "They admitted – they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty – then they pled we're not guilty."
In the filing to get the case thrown out, Trump and his legal team insist that he was not saying they were guilty when he made these remarks.
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"During the debate, Ms. Harris reminded the audience of the 1989 crimes and characterized President-elect Trump’s contemporaneous advertisement as calling for the execution of 'innocent' people," said the filing. "This was misleading as Plaintiffs would not be adjudged 'innocent' until ten years after the ad appeared. In response to these damning accusations, President-elect Trump explained the opinion that he had held in 1989 (that Plaintiffs were guilty) and disclosed the true factual basis for that opinion (that each Plaintiff had admitted guilt to law enforcement). Far from asserting 'false facts,' President elect Trump acknowledged that Plaintiffs later denied guilt and did not dispute that Plaintiffs had ultimately been cleared of wrongdoing."
"Plaintiffs now attempt to recast political rhetoric and debate about criminal justice and public safety as 'defamation,'" said the filing. "This ignores well-settled First Amendment jurisprudence that protects the President-elect’s speech about matters of public concern." the filing continued that Trump's comments "were protected opinions based on true disclosed fact, lacked any defamatory sting, and were substantially true. Plaintiffs’ remaining claims for false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress fail for the same reasons, and because Plaintiffs fail to meet the additional required elements of those claims."
Trump's legal team initially tried to get the case thrown out in November, only to stumble as they cited an inapplicable law in their motion.
