Trump Hit With Another Massive Lawsuit—This Time, From Central Park 5

Donald Trump was sued by the Central Park Five Monday for defamation over comments he made during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia. The lawsuit argues Trump’s debate comments were “extreme and outrageous, and … intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the Central Park Five.

The group of five men were charged and convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989, in a case that garnered national attention. The five Black and Hispanic men were just teenagers when they were convicted. More than a decade later, DNA evidence exonerated them after a serial rapist confessed to the crime, and the teens settled a $41 million lawsuit against the city in 2014.

At the time, Trump took out full-page ads for $85,000 attacking Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, calling for the return of the death penalty in the city’s four newspapers: The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, and New York Newsday. Years later, when he ran for president in 2016, Trump continued to claim that the five were guilty, saying, “the fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”

During the debate last month, Trump repeated the false claim that the five pleaded guilty, that they killed someone, and that Mayor Bloomberg agreed with him, according to the legal filing.

“Defendant Trump falsely stated that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the civil suit read. “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”

The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages.

At the Democratic National Convention in August, members of the group spoke out against Trump, with newly elected New York City Council Member Salaam saying about the former president, “Forty-five wanted us un-alive, he wanted us dead.”

“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will,” Salaam told the Chicago audience.

“Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into [the] courtroom people screamed at us, threatened us, because of Donald Trump,” said Korey Wise.

This story has been updated.

After manning the fry station at a McDonald’s restaurant on Sunday, Donald Trump didn’t answer a point-blank question about whether he would raise the minimum wage.

Trump took off his suit jacket, put on an apron, and watched an employee show him how to put the fries in oil, salt them, and then scoop them into boxes. Later, he took questions from reporters from the drive-through window. CBS’s Olivia Rinaldi asked the former president if “the minimum wage should be raised.”

“Well, I think this: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, a process that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see, these are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs, and it’s great, and great people working here too,” Trump replied, avoiding the topic altogether.

Trump has obsessed over the fact that Kamala Harris worked at a McDonald’s while she was a student at Howard University, repeatedly claiming that it’s not true despite providing no evidence for his claim. Harris has often spoken of her time working at the restaurant, even telling the story in a campaign ad.

Harris’s proposed policies call for raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 due to opposition from Republicans and moderate Democrats. While Trump was president, he didn’t raise or even propose increasing the minimum wage, and was skeptical of how it would help Americans during his 2020 campaign. Trump’s McDonald’s stunt is part of a pattern of appearing to sympathize with working people while enacting policies that benefit the wealthy at workers’ expense.

Donald Trump thinks that President Biden is trying to restrict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The former president said as much during an interview on an airport tarmac after landing in Detroit Friday ahead of a campaign roundtable in the suburb of Auburn Hills, telling reporters that he was about to speak to Netanyahu following Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar Thursday.

“He’s doing a good job,” Trump said about the Israeli leader. “Biden is trying to hold him back, just so you understand, Biden is more superior to the V.P. He’s trying to hold him back, and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that [Netanyahu] decided to do what he had to do, but it’s moving along pretty good.”

Trump characterizing Biden as trying to “hold Netanyahu back” is absurd when the White House privately gave Israel the green light to expand its bombing campaign from Gaza to Lebanon while publicly urging a cease-fire. The idea that Netanyahu is doing a good job when the civilian death toll continues to rise in both Gaza and Lebanon raises the question of how Trump defines a “good job” too—and what he would support if he returns to the White House.

On Thursday, Kamala Harris said that Sinwar’s death represents “an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” adding that a cease-fire was only possible when “Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

While this essentially repeats what the White House has been saying throughout Israel’s war, it’s quite different from Trump’s bombastic rhetoric: He has repeatedly said that Israel has to “finish the job.” The former president’s Friday comments appear to be an attempt to paint Biden, and by extension, Harris, as being less supportive of Israel than him, which flies in the face of America’s backing of Israel over the past year. The question is whether the conflict will cost either candidate critical votes in a few weeks.

Donald Trump was eager to throw his ghostwriters under the bus during an interview with Fox & Friends on Friday.

After Steve Doocy asked the Republican presidential candidate who helped him craft his mean-spirited jokes for Thursday night’s Al Smith charity dinner, Trump took to complaining about his joke writers. “I had a lot of people, a couple people from Fox actually, I shouldn’t say that. But they wrote some jokes. For the most part I didn’t like any of them,” said Trump to the Fox team.

But a network spokesperson was quick to fact-check Trump and clarified “FOX News confirmed that no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes” for the former president’s tight 10.

It appears that some of Trump’s jokes may have come from comedian Nick Di Paolo, who is not an employee or contract freelancer for the Fox News network but is a contributor to Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show. Di Paolo was fired from a previous gig for joking about school shooters.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump wanted to get a dig in at Fox while appearing on the network, considering his on-again-off-again relationship with Fox’s billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch. During his Friday appearance, he criticized Fox News for airing any negative political ads against him.

“I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch,” said Trump. “I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it … and I’m going to tell him something very simple.… Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, and don’t put on … they’re horrible people that come on and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”

Additionally, Trump may be acting out against Fox News due to jealousy: The ratings for Kamala Harris’s Fox News interview boasted more than double the viewers of his appearance on the network.

Kamala Harris called out Donald Trump Friday for canceling interviews and public appearances, saying that Trump may not have the stamina for another term as president. 

Speaking at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Harris referenced recent reports from Trump’s campaign that the former president is exhausted, reminding the crowd that Trump also pulled out of a second debate with her. 

“He is ducking debates and canceling interviews. Come on,” Harris said, smiling as the audience booed. 

“And check this out: His own campaign team recently said it is because of exhaustion. Well, if you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world,” Harris added as the partisan crowd cheered.

When he was president, Trump often faced criticism for skipping important functions, such as a 2018 visit to a World War I cemetery in France with other allies. But he was still campaigning vigorously then—something that isn’t the case now. 

Later on Friday, Trump fired back at Harris, accusing her of ducking events. 

“She should have been last night with the Catholics,” Trump said, referencing the Al Smith dinner, a bipartisan charity event in New York Thursday night that Harris didn’t attend. 

“So all they do is put out sound bites. Tell me when you’ve seen me take even a little bit of a rest. I’m not even tired, I’m really exhilarated. You know why? We’re killing her in the polls, because the American people don’t want her,” Trump added. “She didn’t pass her bar exam. She’s not a smart person. She’s not a person that should represent our country.”

Many of the interviews that Trump has pulled out of are those where he would face tougher, unbiased interviewers, such as CBS’s 60 Minutes, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and NBC News. In contrast, the Al Smith dinner is a lighthearted event where the speakers usually make jokes, and Trump used his speech to make a bitter, profanity-laden rant against his political opponents in a room full of Catholic priests. 

With the election only weeks away, every action from Trump and Harris is being closely scrutinized by voters and media outlets. Pulling back on public appearances, media interviews, and another presidential debate would bring any candidate negative attention, let alone the oldest candidate in history, who refuses to release his medical records.  

A cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation are suing the federal government to limit access to mifepristone, one of the pills used to induce an abortion—but an underlying reason behind the suit is perhaps one of the most insidious anti-abortion initiatives yet.

Mifepristone, combined with misoprostol, composes the two-step prescription referred to as “the abortion pill.” The procedure accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits.

The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.

And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.

Donald Trump expressed surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s legal trouble in an interview on The Dan Bongino Show Friday morning.

“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlonged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of the king of the woke, right? And yet he got it. And I figured that maybe he wouldn’t get hit so hard,” Trump told Bongino. 

Trump seemed to be insinuating some sort of left-wing or liberal conspiracy behind who faces criminal charges in referring to Weinstein, a convicted serial sex offender and longtime Democratic donor. 

“So when they do get hit, they get hit. But that’s the only one I can think of. Normally they protect everybody. What they did with [Eric Adams] is very suspect,” Trump added, referring to the recently indicted New York City mayor, a Democrat.    

There’s a lot to unpack from Trump’s comments, as his claim that liberals tend to protect their own from prosecution also isn’t true, considering the cases of Democrats Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar this year as well as others in recent decades. 

Trump also brought up Weinstein unprompted, and said “I don’t know him well.” This raises the question of whether the former president is lying and did know Weinstein, which then raises further questions about whether Trump knew about Weinstein’s reputation as a serial abuser. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering Trump’s own record with sexual abuse.

It’s a reminder of Trump’s relationship with another infamous sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The former president has praised Epstein as a “good salesman” and was named in the documents released following a lawsuit against the billionaire from one of his victims.  

With less than three weeks til Election Day, Donald Trump’s lukewarm media appearances—which have featured the Republican presidential nominee struggling to piece words together—showcase just how frail he has become.

During an appearance on Fox & Friends Friday morning, Trump voluntarily created sound bites that were so absurd they could be mistaken for deepfakes.

Responding to a call-in question from a child inquiring about his favorite farm animal, Trump couldn’t help himself from dropping an unfounded rally talking point of his: that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to ban bovines in the United States.

“I’ll tell you what I love, I love cows,” Trump slurred. “But if we go with Kamala you won’t have any cows.

“I don’t want to ruin this kid’s day. I love cows, I think they’re so cute and so beautiful and so.… But according to Kamala, who’s a radical left lunatic, you will not have any cows anymore,” he added.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump suddenly flipped and got snippy with the Fox hosts, scolding them for playing “attack ads” against him this election cycle.

“But you know the difference? In the old days, you never played negative ads. When I leave here, I’ll then be hit by five or six ads,” Trump said. “When I leave, I’ll have 12 people from Kamala on—and, you know, pretty much unopposed—for 19 days. I don’t think we should do that anymore.

“You shouldn’t play negative ads,” Trump continued. “I love complaining, I like to have everything perfect.”

Trump’s own allies appear aware of the fatal flaw, with some of the MAGA leader’s closest advisers admitting that Trump isn’t consistently at his best.

“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great. I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters,” Trump adviser David Urban told The New York Times.

Right-wingers in the United States and across the pond are spinning out about a small group of Labour Party organizers coming to canvas in battleground states.

According to a LinkedIn post by the head of operations of the Labour Party, nearly 100 of the U.K.’s left-wing party’s staff are coming to knock doors in North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. MAGA leaders are claiming this is foreign election interference, even though it is expressly legal, according to the Federal Election Commission.

“Foreign nationals are not allowed to be involved in anyway in U.S. election,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday, claiming that the U.K. volunteers are violating Federal Election Commission regulations. “Please go back to the UK and fix your own mass immigration problems that are ruining your country.”

“Yet another reason to vote for President Trump,” said Senator Tom Cotton.

“Isn’t this foreign election interference? Imagine if members of the Russian Duma did this,” wrote far-right poster Ian Miles Cheong, who pinned the tweet to his profile. Elon Musk agreed, writing simply, “This is illegal.”

It’s not. Although foreign nationals may not donate or take on management roles in a campaign, they “may participate in campaign activities as an uncompensated volunteer,” according to FEC guidelines.

Given that volunteers are reportedly paying for their own travel and are unpaid volunteers, they shouldn’t be breaking the law. This also isn’t a new phenomenon; in 2016 at least 70 British Labour activists came to swing states to campaign for Hillary Clinton. However, one constitutional and electoral law expert who spoke to the Telegraph suggested that if an individual spends more than $1,000 on the trip, they could be breaking an FEC rule, as travel expenses about that amount could be considered a donation to the party.

Even U.K. politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage tried to paint the canvassing as nefarious. “This is direct election interference by the governing Labour Party, and particularly stupid if Trump wins. Who is paying for all of this?”

However, it appears that Farage didn’t have any problems directly campaigning for Donald Trump in 2020.

And one of the featured speakers at the RNC? Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz “Lettuce” Truss.

The judge in Donald Trump’s criminal 2020 election inference case released hundreds of pages of evidence Friday.

Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered that the clerk of courts file all four volumes of special counsel Jack Smith’s redacted appendix Friday morning, one day after rejecting a request from Trump’s legal team to delay the unsealing until after the presidential election next month.

Volume I of the filing contained several mostly unredacted interviews conducted by the House January 6 committee. One, with Trump’s valet, was previously redacted in a release from House Republicans. The valet recalled telling Trump that his televised speech had been cut short to show the unrest at the Capitol.

Volume II contained a collection of tweets, the majority of which were from Trump’s personal account, not his official POTUS account. This included his call for followers to attend a “big protest” in Washington, D.C., noting that it “will be wild!”

Volume III contained highlighted excerpts of Mike Pence’s book So Help Me God, detailing how Pence had tried to “encourage” Trump to accept the actual election results as his fraud cases fell apart. Pence reminded Trump that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”

Volume IV of the filing contained several pieces of evidence that were already publicly available, such as Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that preceded the January 6 riot at the Capitol, in which he undermined the results of the election.

It included Trump’s comments on January 6, broadcast on C-SPAN, urging MAGA rioters to “go home” while reaffirming that the election had been “stolen.” The volume also contained the special counsel’s report, which found that Trump’s former attorney Peter Navarro had violated the Hatch Act.

Additionally, the filing includes several fundraising emails from the Trump campaign and budget and travel planning documents, which might financially connect Trump to the January 6 riot.

While the promise of such a massive release brought many to believe they would find new information about Trump’s alleged illegal activities, much of the filings were redacted, with large sections appearing blank, not available for public viewing.

But that didn’t stop Trump’s legal team from scrambling until the last minute to try and prevent the documents’ release.

This story has been updated.