debate Archives - Home Safety Tech Pros

Trump says he did not defame Central Park 5 at debate

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 07:31:52 +0000

Inset, left to right: Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana (CBS Sunday Morning). Background: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., June 22, 2024. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)

Donald Trump implored a federal judge in Pennsylvania to toss out the defamation lawsuit filed against him by members of the Central Park Five over comments the president-elect made during last year’s presidential debate, claiming the falsely-accused quintet are portraying his “substantially true” comments out of context.

The 12-page reply motion seeking to have the suit dismissed was filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and reiterated many of Trump’s previous arguments about the case, mainly, claiming the plaintiffs rely on “misrepresentations of President-elect Trump’s arguments” that could only be defamatory if one were “reviewing the at-issue statements out of context.”

Specifically, Trump’s attorneys argue that his statements about the quintet were in response to Vice President Kamala Harris’ comments about the full-page ads Trump took out calling for their execution in the immediate aftermath of their 1989 arrests and were about his state of mind at the time.

“In direct response to this attack regarding the 1989 ad, President-elect Trump responded with several phrases that showed his statements were directly in reference to his reasoning for the 1989 ad,” the motion states. “First, President-elect Trump noted that Vice President Harris had to go back ‘many, many years’ to find material to attack him. Second, he used the phrase ‘well, I said if …,’ an indication that he was harkening back to prior reasoning rather than making present claims.”

Trump’s statements during the debate

The action centers on the following exchange between Trump and Harris during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, viewed by over 67 million people. Harris had just accused Trump of using “race to divide the American people” before referring to Trump’s ads.

Harris: “Let’s remember, this is the same individual [Trump] who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, The Central Park Five. Took out a full-page ad calling for their execution. ….”

Trump: “… They come up with things with things like she just said, going back many, many years, when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five. They admitted — they said they pled guilty. And I said, well if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty. But this is a person that has to stretch back years, forty, fifty years ago, because there is nothing now. ….”

The lawsuit

According to plaintiffs Antron Brown, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam, Trump’s comments were “demonstrably false.”

“Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing,” the lawsuit said. “Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”

Trump’s Wednesday reply motion

Trump on Wednesday argued that no “reasonable listener” (the standard for defamation claims) would come away from hearing the president-elect’s full statement believing that the plaintiffs really did what Trump said.

“A ‘reasonable listener’ hearing the statements in their full context would never come away with the impression that President-elect Trump was making a present assertion that Plaintiffs ‘pled guilty’ and ‘killed a person,”” the motion states. “Further, he did not dispute Vice-President Harris’s claims of innocence, and, in fact, followed up his own statement that they ‘pled guilty’ with a qualifier that they then pled ‘not guilty.’ No reasonable listener would interpret the statements as Plaintiffs suggest.”

Trump also argued that “his challenged statements were substantially true,” asserting that when he said the plaintiffs “pled guilty” and “ultimately killed a person,” those remarks would have virtually the same effect on the average person as the truth. Trump reasoned that while the men never formally pleaded guilty, they did initially confess to police (under duress).

Similarly, while the victim, Patricia Meili, survived the attack (and is still alive today), Trump said she was left “virtually dead” and “in a coma.”

“As to the attack on Ms. Meili, the proper comparison is whether, in the mind of a listener, an accused’s initial admission to a beating that ultimately left a victim dead would be substantially the same as an initial admission to a beating that left a victim ‘virtually dead,’” the motion states. “Here too, there would not be a ‘different effect’ on the listener’s mind between the two statements because, in either case, the listener would understand the accused to have admitted to a vicious, murderous beating before recanting.”

Backstory of the Central Park Five

In 1989, the then-teenagers were wrongly accused of raping Trisha Meili as she jogged in Central Park. The five were also accused of attacking two men that same night.

“While in police custody, Plaintiffs were each separately subjected to hours of coercive interrogation, under duress, with no attorney present and often without a parent or guardian present,” the lawsuit recounted. “Plaintiffs all initially denied having any knowledge of the Central Park assaults. However, after hours of interrogation, four of the Plaintiffs agreed to provide written and videotaped statements in which they falsely admitted to having been present during the assaults.”

From there, the Central Park Five faced trials, maintained their innocence, were convicted by juries in 1990 and were sent to prison, only to be exonerated decades later after the real attacker, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime against Meili and DNA “conclusively” proved that Reyes was the “true perpetrator,” court documents said.

“In fact, Plaintiffs were not involved in the assaults in any way, and their statements were the product of coercion and duress,” the lawsuit said. “Plaintiffs all recanted their coerced statements shortly after their interrogations.”

The Central Park Five were ultimately exonerated, their convictions were vacated, and New York City went on to settle a lawsuit for $41 million

Source link

The post Trump says he did not defame Central Park 5 at debate appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.

Paul Weiss partner, ‘a skilled handler of high-ego politicians,’ is helping Harris with debate prep

homesafetytechpros — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:16:01 +0000

Careers

Paul Weiss partner, ‘a skilled handler of high-ego politicians,’ is helping Harris with debate prep

By Debra Cassens Weiss

September 10, 2024, 11:10 am CDT

Karen Dunn in May 2022 in Washington, D.C. Dunn, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, helped Vice President Kamala Harris prepare for Tuesday’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump. (Photo by K98wld, CC-BY-SA-4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

A partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison helped Vice President Kamala Harris prepare for Tuesday’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump, even as she prepared as lead attorney for Google in an antitrust trial based on alleged online advertising dominance.

Since 2008, partner Karen Dunn has helped prepare Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates for debates, the New York Times reports. She helped Harris prepare for her 2020 debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence. And she also helped former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama prepare for presidential debates.

Dunn “is described by candidates she has coached and other people who have worked with her as a skilled handler of high-ego politicians,” according to the New York Times. “By all accounts, she possesses the rare ability to tell them what they are doing wrong and how to fix it—and how to inject humor and humanity to sell themselves to voters watching the debate.”

Dunn, co-chair of the Paul Weiss litigation department, is one of the attorneys who obtained a verdict for injured plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A graduate of Yale Law School, she is a former clerk for now-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a former clerk for then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

The New York Times credits Dunn for spurring Clinton during a 2016 debate to bring up a Trump comment disparaging a beauty pageant contestant’s weight. Here is a portion of the debate transcript published by the New York Times:

Clinton: “And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”

Trump: “Where did you find this? Where did you find this?”

Clinton: “Her name is Alicia Machado.”

Trump: “Where did you find this?”

Clinton: “And she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet … ”

Trump: “Oh, really?”

Clinton: “ … she’s going to vote this November.”

Trump: “OK, good. Let me just tell you … ”

(Applause)

In a 2019 interview with the New York Times, Dunn said debate contestants have to engage the other person in a way that challenges them if they want to win the debate.

“If somebody comes after you and you counterpunch effectively, you can win that moment,” Dunn said.

Dunn was in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Monday representing Google in a Department of Justice suit alleging that the online search company’s acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising software company, gives it dominance in technology that auctions off online ads, allowing Google to crush the competition. Dunn countered that Google is “one big company among many others” that also sell advertising, the New York Times reports.

Critics have alleged that Dunn’s debate preparation creates a conflict of interest because helping Harris would make the presidential candidate reluctant to stand up to Big Tech, the New York Post reports.

But ethics experts who spoke with the New York Times and Law.com said there was no ethics problem.

“Of course, Ms. Dunn cannot reveal confidential client information concerning Google to anyone. But she is not precluded from giving Ms. Harris advice about how to conduct herself in the debate,” said Leslie Levin, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, in an interview with Law.com.

“Lawyers in private practice volunteer on political campaigns all the time,” said Steven Lubet, a professor emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, in an interview with the New York Times. “There’s no conflict between coaching debate prep and representing a client in a case opposed to the government.”

Source link

The post Paul Weiss partner, ‘a skilled handler of high-ego politicians,’ is helping Harris with debate prep appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.