CLAIM: Donald Trump took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five.
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. Trump never called for the execution of the Central Park Five, though he did call for the death penalty for murder.
Members of the Central Park Five appeared onstage on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. They were accused of gang raping a female jogger in Central Park, New York City, in 1989.
Their guilt was widely accepted by the public, especially as several of them confessed to the crime. They were released when someone else said that he had raped the victim, Trisha Meili, and that he had acted alone.
Their story was retold by columnist Ann Coulter last year:
Four of The Five gave videotaped confessions, at least three of them in the presence of parents or guardians. Defense attorneys spent weeks attacking the confessions as “coerced,” but two multicultural juries and the trial judge concluded that the confessions were voluntary.
…
More than a decade later, when psychopathic killer Matias Reyes came forward to “confess” that he alone had raped the jogger — a crime for which he would face no additional punishment — DNA testing on the semen could prove only that he’d raped her, not that he’d acted alone, or whether, as a former cellmate says, he’d heard the jogger’s screams and ran to join the attack in progress.
Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News in the aftermath of the crime. In it, he denounced the rise of crime in passionate terms. He called for the death penalty for murderers. But he did not specifically call for the Central Park Five to be executed.
Donald Trump did not specifically call for the execution of the Central Park Five. He reacted to the incident by denouncing crime in the city in general and calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in general. Read the ad for yourself. pic.twitter.com/DymK3MmtgG
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) August 23, 2024
Trump’s critics argue that given the context of public outrage about the rape, calling for the death penalty for murder was an inflammatory thing to say.
So, too, is making a false accusation from a national stage.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.