President Trump Can’t Dismiss Exonerated Five Defamation Lawsuit

A judge has ruled that President Donald Trump cannot dismiss a lawsuit brought against him by the Exonerated Five (formerly the Central Park Five).

According to MSNBC, U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone rejected Trump’s motion, citing it can be “plausibly inferred” that Trump “had sufficient knowledge of Plaintiffs’ wrongful conviction and exoneration to have understood that Plaintiffs did not plead guilty, nobody died as a result of the crimes that day in Central Park, and Plaintiffs are indeed not guilty.”

Last year, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise filed their defamation lawsuit for spreading “false, misleading, and defamatory” statements during the ABC News presidential debate in September 2024.

During the debate, Trump responded to Harris’ mention of his infamous 1989 full-page ad in The New York Times where he called to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” against the men who were wrongfully accused and charged with attempted murder, rape, and other crimes as teenagers.

“[T]hey come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people including Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg agreed with me on the ‘Central Park 5,‘” he stated before the entire nation on TV. “They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, ‘Well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.’ Then they pled ‘we’re not guilty.’”

Still, Judge Beetlestone added that the Exonerated 5 “hadn’t yet met their legal burden for one of their defamation theories or for their claim that Trump had intentionally inflicted emotional distress” per MSNBC, as the civil case continues.