By Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) -U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing him of making defamatory statements during his campaign 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.
Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that his statements about the men, known widely as the Central Park Five, were legally protected expressions of opinion.
The Central Park Five were cleared in 2002 based on new DNA evidence and another person’s confession. Trump falsely said at a Sept. 10 presidential debate with Democrat Kamala Harris that they had killed a person and pleaded guilty.
Attorneys for Trump said the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment “protects the President-elect’s speech about matters of public concern.”
A lawyer for Trump at Dhillon Law Group declined to comment, and a spokesperson for his transition team did not immediately respond to a request for one. Trump on Monday said he would nominate Dhillon Law Group’s founder Harmeet Dhillon to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Shanin Specter, an attorney for the Central Park Five — Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise — said they expected Trump’s arguments to fail.
“We look forward to taking discovery and proceeding to trial,” Specter said.
The lawsuit said Trump’s “demonstrably false” statements cast the plaintiffs in “a harmful false light and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them.”
Attorneys for the men said they gave false confessions that they later recanted. They never pleaded guilty.
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 ad in several New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario and David Gregorio)