More than three decades ago, Americans got to see the truth about who Donald Trump is. Not because of his involvement with Epstein, not because of his notorious misogyny, not even because of his policies as President of the United States of America. Rather the truth about who Donald Trump is, behind a somewhat faltering facade, was displayed through his opinion of five teenage boys in New York City.
In the spring of 1989, a time when drug abuse and violence ran rampant through New York City, a specific case took not only the city, but the nation by storm. Trisha Meili was running through Central Park in Manhattan the night she was brutally attacked and raped. It’s noted that that evening “dozens of teens” had been entering the park, and numerous assaults and muggings had been reported.
Within two hours of Meili’s assault six teens – Antron McCray (15), Kevin Richardson (14), Yusef Salaam (15), Raymond Santana (14), Korey Wise (16), and Steven Lopez (15) – were indicted on charges related to the case. Lopez’s charges on Meili’s case were dropped after he pleaded guilty to a separate assault. The remaining five would go on to be known as the Central Park Five, or later as the Exonerated Five.
A common theme within the judicial system in the U.S. both in the late ’80s and continuing even now, more than three decades later, is the incarceration of Black or Latino men for crimes that there is no evidence to support they committed. By 1989 this was not a new theme. Across the nation, men of color were wrongfully convicted for decades, receiving maximum life sentences or the death penalty in cases with faulty evidence. Meili’s case was no different in this sense: a white woman who was brutally attacked and no clear perpetrator to imprison, leading to the arrest of five boys of color.
Less than two weeks after Meili’s assault, then-businessman Donald Trump paid an estimated $85,000, around $222,000 today, to get a full-page advertisement published in all four of the major newspapers around the city. The ads, originally printed in all-caps, read, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” and “BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Without naming the boys or other individuals by name Trump sent a clear and pointed message, stating, “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” and, “Let our politicians give back our police departments power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of police brutality.” Despite the ads having a relatively vague subject, the families of the five boys received countless death threats in the following days making a clear connection between the Central Park Five and the advertisements.
Despite lack of DNA evidence or any true concrete proof, all five boys were sentenced to prison in 1990. Richardson, Santana, McCray and Salaam were sentenced to five to 10 years in juvenile detention, where they were released after six to seven years. Wise, who was tried as an adult, was sentenced to 15 years but got released after 13. Then in 2002 all five men were exonerated of the crime when DNA evidence and confessions from the perpetrator proved them not-guilty on all accounts.
Now, more than 30 years later, President Donald Trump has never retracted his statements or apologized for the wrongful messages portrayed in those advertisements. Trump’s decision to buy those pages wasn’t a display of his intense support of the legal system; it wasn’t his push for fair trials; it was instead a representation of how Trump truly views not only the legal system but how he views people of color. Only last September Trump stated that the children of Baltimore, a highly diverse and predominantly black city, were “born to be criminals.” Perhaps Trump used to hide his bigotry behind a ruse of lawfulness and safety, but it seems this mask is slipping. No longer does he feel the need to make blanket statements in ads he bought; because now we’ve given him the platform to make the statements to the entire world. Donald Trump has always and will always be the same millionaire who bought ads to support the death penalty, just as he’s the same president who supports tearing families apart under the pretense of “safety.”
Article by Maggie McMillen