Yusef Salaam, one of the released Central Park Five, had only one word for former President Donald Trump’s indictment Thursday: “Karma.”
Salam was one of five black and brown teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for raping a white woman in New York’s Central Park in 1989, a case explored in the 2019 Netflix series “When They See Us.” Salaam was imprisoned for almost seven years before he and other wrongly accused teenagers were released in 2002.
In 1989, before one of the five teenagers had been tried, Trump, then a Manhattan real-estate developer, took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York. Those involved in the case later said that although Trump’s ads never mentioned the death penalty for the defendants, they played a key role in securing their convictions.
Salaam, who recently announced his candidacy for the New York City Council, noted on Thursday that Trump has never “apologized for calling for an execution.”
In 2019, when Trump was asked if he would apologize, he said: “You have people on both sides. They admit their guilt.”
Members of the five, now criminal justice activists, say they were coerced by police into confessing.
“During hours of relentless questioning, the detective repeatedly lied to us,” Salaam, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana wrote in a 2019 opinion article for The New York Times, describing themselves as “scared boys” at the time. .
“They said they matched our fingerprints with the crime scene evidence and told everyone that someone else confessed and caused the attack. They said if we just admitted to participating in the attack, we could go home. They were all blatant lies.”
Trump was indicted Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in a $130,000 cash payment to Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election. The payment was given in exchange for the adult film actor’s silence about a relationship he claims he had with Trump a decade ago.