Yusef Salaam was one of five teenage black and Latino defendants wrongly convicted in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, found guilty of raping a young white woman.
News media at the time were filled with allegations calling the youths a “wolf pack,” out on a “wilding” spree.
During the proceedings Donald Trump bought full-page ads in five New York papers, his message screaming with the call to bring back the death penalty and declaring “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!”
The only problem was that the five young men, convicted of the crime and sent to prison where they served their full sentences, were not guilty, their innocence proved by subsequent DNA tests and the confession of the real rapist on 2002.
But that didn’t stop Trump from declaring to CNN earlier this month that “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
In an interview with Danny Katch reported in Jacobin magazine, Salaam was unsparing in his criticism of Trump:
It really is a sad situation when you have a person in that position — who has the capacity and definitely the wherewithal to do his fact-checking, especially now that he’s running to be president — who still stays on the side of lies and falsehoods.
Part of the reason why I think he said it is because he took out the full-page ad that ran in New York City newspapers basically calling for our death — I think he mentioned recently that that was received so positively.
If you think about the history of black people in this country and the history of other folks, it’s two different types of history. We have black people who were supposed to be freed from slavery, and then immediately, the slave codes were instituted, and so forth and so on.
And so here it is — four blacks and one Latino, and we were immediately looked at as being guilty and had to prove ourselves innocent. Under the law, it says you’re innocent until proven guilty. So for Donald Trump to take out those ads in such a big way, it was the worst thing in the world.
And the worst part about it is that there’s an infallibility to a person like Donald Trump — you know what I’m saying? He had to apologize about these comments that he made about those young ladies, but he was sixty years old at the time!
It’s not like he was feeling his way through life and trying to understand things. He’s a grown man, and this is the fiber in the fabric of who he is. And then he tries to chalk it up as “just locker-room banter.” But most people who hang out in the locker rooms don’t talk like that. They don’t talk about sexually assaulting women and thinking that it’s okay, you know? That’s a very, very sick way to be.
eats shoots 'n leaves 