Everything to Know About the Central Park 5 Case Featured in Netflix Miniseries (2024)

On the night of April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old banker named Trisha Meili was jogging in New York City’s Central Park — something she often did after work to help her unwind. But shortly before midnight that night, two joggers discovered Meili unconscious in a wooded ravine.

She’d been brutally raped and had a fractured skull. Meili went into a 12-day coma and had no memory of the attack, and the horrific attack became front page news during a time in New York City marked by high crime and tense race relations.

Five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem — Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Antron McCray — had been in the park that night. Despite no physical evidence tying them to the crime, and after an interrogation they say was coerced, they were swiftly arrested and dubbed the “Central Park Five” by the media.

The media tipped into a frenzy of accusations many would say were racially-tinged, claiming the teens had been “wilding” before the attack. Then-mayor Ed Koch even reportedly called them “monsters.”

All five were later convicted and sentenced to between five and 15 years in prison.

It wasn’t until more than a decade later that the truth would emerge and DNA evidence would free them. In the intervening years, the young men’s stories have the subject of countless articles, books and films, the latest of which is When They See Us, a scripted four-part series from Ava DuVernay. Who are the Central Park Five, and what was the real story?

Years in Prison After False Convictions

Richardson, Salaam, Santana, Wise and McCray were questioned shortly after the attack on Meili, and they gave incorrect and conflicting information about crucial details of the crime. Their DNA was also not present at the scene.

But in hours-long police interrogations, overseen by Linda Fairstein, who was then head of the Manhattan District Attorney’s sex crime unit, four of them confessed on camera. They later claimed these confessions had been coerced. In a 2016 op-ed, Salaam wrote that their admissions were made under duress: “Police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

Trump Took Out Ads Calling for Reinstatement of Death Penalty

The vicious attack on Meili played into deep-seated fears about crime and violence that were already bubbling over. As The New York Times puts it, “…The daily pulse of New York life included a murder, on average, every five hours, every day; rapes nearly twice as often; and robberies just five or six minutes apart.”

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That year, Donald Trump stoked these fears further by spending $85,000 to place full-page ads in four New York newspapers blaring, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY!”

Salaam later said his family received more death threats after Trump’s inflammatory ads. “I knew that this famous person calling for us to die was very serious,” Salaam told The Guardian in 2016. “We were all afraid. Our families were afraid.”

Despite the fact that the young men were exonerated in 2002, Trump still believes in their guilt — at least as of 2016, when he told CNN, “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.”

A Serial Rapist Later Confessed to the Crime

In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes, then serving a long sentence for murder and rape, confessed to attacking Meili in the park that night in 1989.

Reyes was dubbed the “East Side Rapist” for the string of rapes — and one murder — he committed in the months after the Central Park Five had been arrested. In 2002, when the already-imprisoned Reyes finally admitted that he was also responsible for Meili’s Central Park rape, he reported details of the crime that only the perpetrator would know. He was also connected to the crime via DNA evidence.

The Men Were Exonerated in 2002

After Reyes’ confession, the Central Park Five’s convictions were vacated. In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city of New York settled with the Central Park Five for $41 million in a civil rights lawsuit they had filed.

“They spent a lot of their lives in jail, in prison, wrongly,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “We have an obligation to do something fair for them, for the whole city to turn the page and move forward.”

The Scars Linger

Though the men were released, their lives were irrevocably damaged by both their wrongful convictions and the racially-tinged hatred they say they faced. The men, all of whom support the new Netflix film, say they still bear scars.

“We had all gone through hell,” Salaam said recently in the New York Times, with Richardson noting, “PTSD is real and I go through that. … We always say we have invisible scars nobody sees.”