A Rape in 1989 Put Trump on the Radar of Racists and Woke Up Karma

Why Does Trump Think He Is Innocent and the 'Central Park Five' Still Guilty?

Courtesy of KOB4

In 1989, a young woman went jogging at night in Central Park in New York. Shortly after beginning her run, she was attacked, brutally raped, and left for dead. Trish Meili today works with survivors of sexual violence in the same city where her life was so radically altered. Days after her attack, playboy and future buffoon Donald Trump put an ad in all New York papers (see above).

Trump, having grown up wealthy and a product of privilege, nonetheless was in tune with the pulse of much of New York. Racism was, is, and always will be a very real sentiment. There are still pockets of New York City that are as backward and hateful as Mississippi in 1960. Black men know from birth to stay out of those neighborhoods, and the simple turn of a wrong corner can mean trouble — the same holds true for whites living in the city. It is a marvelous city, regardless of all of humanity’s ignorance and weaknesses, and in that city, in 2003, the young men of “Central Park Five,” as their group (two of the boys didn’t know the other three) would infamously be called, were released from prison for the rape mentioned above. 

Donald Trump’s call for returning the death penalty to put these “animals” to death — remember, five Black men were accused of raping a white woman — made him a hero among the “deplorables.” I am more than certain that most of the boys who were cheering the Donald then are staunch Trumpists today. Trump had found a cohort that would love him regardless of all of his sins — actually love him because of those sins. 

In that same city, in 2003, the five young men who were found guilty of raping Ms. Meili were acquitted and released from prison.

In 2002, 13 years after the Central Park attack and with four of the Central Park Five out of prison, convicted serial rapist Matias Reyes came forward and said he was Meili’s sole attacker.

He had met Wise earlier when they were both at New York’s Rikers Island jail, and then later had seen him at a prison upstate. Reyes, who has been doing 33 years to life for a murder-rape conviction, reached out to police, who were able to match his DNA to the DNA at the Central Park crime scene.

Reyes also knew some details about Meili and the crime that had never been released and that only the person who had been there could know. Reyes, who had been given the nickname “East Side Rapist” for a series of violent rapes along Madison Avenue in the spring and summer of 1989, had also attacked a woman in the park a few days prior to — and not far from — the April 19 attack on Meili (I So Wish the Case Hadn’t Been Settled).

Some New York policemen, who were accused of severely violating the rights of the five young men, and the victim herself still doubt the innocence of the men. In 2014, the city of New York settled for $41 million with them after they sued for wrongful imprisonment. 

In the same city where those young men were wrongly accused and imprisoned and then released, on May 30th, 2024, Donald Trump became a convicted felon. 

It’s the same courthouse where five Black and Latino youths were wrongly convicted 34 years ago in the beating and rape of a white female jogger. The former president famously took out a newspaper ad in New York City in the aftermath of the 1989 attack calling for the execution of the accused in a case that roiled racial tensions locally and that many point to as evidence of a criminal justice system prejudiced against defendants of color.

But on Friday, a day after making history as the first U.S. president convicted of felony crimes in a court of law, Trump blasted that same criminal justice system as corrupt and rigged against him.

Some Black Americans found irony in Trump railing against the injustice of his own conviction in a courthouse where five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted in a case Trump supported so vociferously. The Central Park Five case was Trump’s first foray into tough-on-crime politics that preluded his full-throated populist political persona. To many, Trump employed dog whistles as well as overtly racist rhetoric in both chapters of his public life (Black Leaders Call Out Trump).

If we ask Trump today about the innocence of the men known as the Central Park Five, he will shout loudly and clearly that they are guilty. 

Trump, then a popular business mogul, claimed that the city was being “ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.”

“At what point did we cross the line from the fine and noble pursuit of genuine civil liberties to the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh at her family’s anguish?” he continued in the ad (They Admitted Their Guilt).

At the time, Trump railed about rampant crime in the city and a lack of “law and order.” Can you imagine? Trump, a man known for raping at will and grabbing the genitals of women he finds pleasing to his eye, a man who incited an insurrection and was impeached for trying to steal an election, has the audacity to pretend that “law and order” are concepts which he spends hours contemplating. Trump, as we know now, was committing his own transgressions against women then. Trump has never been a man of honor, and law and order for him are constructed out of Play-Doh to be molded into any shape the serial liar and 34-time felon needs to achieve the next win. 

At the expense of the victim Trisha Miele, Trump used his racist rhetoric in 1989 to make himself a poster child for white racists in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. His meteor had appeared on the radar and was zooming toward Earth. 

Recently, we have been seeing Trump’s polling numbers increasing with Blacks and Hispanics. Let’s use his ad and his continued belief in the guilt of those men against him. Let’s show the Black and Hispanic voters taking a liking to him just what he really thinks of them. 

A Trump foundational belief is that a Black man in court is inherently guilty, and whites should be given “fair trials.”