In 1989, a female jogger was brutally attacked and raped in Central Park in New York City. The crime gripped the city for weeks. Five teenagers were arrested, confessed and implicated one another after intense police questioning, convicted, and sent to prison. They were exonerated years later based on DNA evidence and the confession of another criminal. Trump to this day insists that the original teens who spent 13 years in prison were guilty.

“New York” magazine describes Trump’s intense interest in punishing the perpetrators, taking out full-page ads in every NYC newspaper.

“On Thursday, Trump reaffirmed his view that law and order must take a backseat to punishing people (particularly, nonwhite people) whom he has declared guilty. Asked by CNN for a comment on the exoneration of the Central Park Five, the Republican nominee provided this statement:

“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…..”

The story says:

“In 1989, five teenagers — four black and one Hispanic — were arrested for the rape of a 28-year-old white woman in Central Park. The woman was left bound, beaten, and brain-damaged. She was identified as a banker, an ambitious career woman, the kind of person the city needed more of. The “Central Park Five” were identified as hoodlums, superpredators, the kind of people the city needed to expel.

“The crime sold papers.

“And Trump took out full-page ads in all of New York City’s major ones, two weeks after the attack, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. The mogul never explicitly mentioned the five, but did reference criminals who “beat and rape a helpless woman.”

“After two days of questioning, police secured confessions from all five of the accused — although each teenager denied raping the woman himself, and placed guilt on someone else within the group. They later retracted those confessions, claiming they’d been coerced. They were convicted nonetheless.”

“But in 2002, a convicted rapist named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, saying he had acted alone. While police were unable to connect DNA from any of the Central Park Five to the scene of the crime, Reyes’s DNA matched that in semen found on the victim’s body. The five were exonerated and paid a $41 million settlement in 2014.”

But Trump still believes the Central Park 5 were guilty. It was one of his obsessions, like his campaign to prove that President Obama was not born in the US.