By Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump has failed to persuade a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing him of making defamatory statements about five Black and Hispanic men who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a white jogger in New York’s Central Park.
Philadelphia-based U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone ruled on Thursday that the men had presented enough evidence for now to pursue their lawsuit accusing Trump of defaming them in comments he made during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court last October by Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise. The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages for reputational and emotional harms as well as punitive damages.
The White House declined to comment. A lawyer representing Trump in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did lead attorneys for the plaintiffs.
The men, called the Central Park Five, were cleared in 2002 based on new DNA evidence and another person’s confession.
Trump falsely said during a September 10 presidential debate with Democrat Kamala Harris that the men had killed someone and pleaded guilty, the plaintiffs said in their October lawsuit. Attorneys for the men said they gave false confessions that they later recanted. They never pleaded guilty.
The lawsuit said Trump’s “demonstrably false” statements cast the plaintiffs in “a harmful false light.”
In seeking dismissal of the lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing in December that his statements about the men were legally protected expressions of opinion under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Beetlestone said Trump’s statement at issue “must be construed as one of fact, not opinion,” because it can “objectively determined” to be false that the men pleaded guilty or killed someone.
Trump has drawn criticism before over his statements about the Central Park Five. After the jogger’s assault, he spoke out about the case and took out a full-page advertisement in several New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington; Editing by David Bario, Chizu Nomiyama and Will Dunham)
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