NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 19: Yusef Salaam attends the unveiling of the "Gate of the Exonerated" in Harlem on December 19, 2022 in New York City. The "Gate of the Exonerated" honors the Central Park Five, five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted for the 1989 Central Park jogger rape. (Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage)
Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, kept it short and sweet when reacting to former President Donald Trump‘s indictment on Thursday, offering one poignant word to the situation.
“For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump – who never said sorry for calling for my execution – here it is: Karma” Salaam tweeted upon learning of Trump’s 34-count indictment.
In 1989, Salaam – along with four other Black teenagers – were wrongfully imprisoned for the rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park.
Salaam served nearly seven years in prison before he and the other four were exonerated in back 2002.
However, Trump took out full-page newspaper advertisements calling politicians in New York to reinstate the death penalty.
None of the five teens had been tried at the time of the slanderous ads.
While those close to the situation eventually said that Trump’s ads didn’t explicitly call for the death penalty for the five Black teenagers, they did play a major role in securing a conviction against them.
In 2019, when Trump was asked about giving an apology to the boys, he claimed: “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt,” according to HuffPost.
On Thursday, Salaam, who recently announced his candidacy for New York City Council, went on to say that Trump never “said sorry for calling for my execution.”
All five boys, Salaam, Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson are now criminal justice activists.
They added that they were coerced by police into confessing to the crime, despite not committing it.
“During the hours of relentless questioning that we each endured, detectives lied to us repeatedly,” Salaam, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana wrote in a 2019 opinion article for The New York Times, describing themselves as “terrified young boys” at the time.
The article went on to read: “They said they had matched our fingerprints to crime scene evidence and told each of us that the others had confessed and implicated us in the attack. They said that if we just admitted to participating in the attack, we could go home. All of these were blatant lies.”
The Shade Room reported that on Thursday, Trump was indicted Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury on 34-counts for his role in making $130,000 in hush-money payments to adult movie star Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 election.
The funds were paid to Daniels to remain silent about an alleged affair between her and Trump a decade beforehand.
