New York City council member Yusuf Salaam was stopped by police last weekend, allegedly over illegally tinted car windows. Encounter reportedly hostile but both walked away unharmed.
Normally not national news except Salaam is one of the Central Park Five. For those too young to remember, late 1980s, a young white woman who worked at a Wall Street bank was found in Central Park. She had been raped and so severely beaten she was in a coma with massive brain damage. There was a lot of pressure to solve the case.
At that time the urban scare was "wilding", a term referring to groups, generally assumed to be young men of color, who used their sheer numbers to commit crimes.
Five teen boys, all Black or Hispanic, were arrested for the rape and beating. It was alleged without evidence they had been wilding. The boys, all minors, were grilled for hours without parents or attorneys. They were finally each separately told the others had confessed and named them as ringleader so it would be best for them to confess. Finally all the boys confessed under duress.
All recanted their confessions. There was no evidence tying them to the crime. Although the victim recovered consciousness, due to brain damage she had no memory of the event and could not identify suspects; cops and prosecutor told her the boys were guilty.
They were convicted. Trump took out a full page ad in New York Times demanding death penalty for the boys.
After ten years in prison another man, convicted of five other rapes, acknowledged he was the one who raped the woman. The young men were released and conviction expunged.
Salaam used prison time to educate himself. On release he fought for social justice and eventually was elected to city council.
After the traffic stop, Charlie Kirk, acknowledged racist and Trump sycophant on Talking Points, a far right site, proclaimed that rapist Salaam had committed another crime, declared Salaam had gang raped the woman and having "gotten away with" gang rape, although he served ten years for a crime he did not commit, thought he was entitled to get away with traffic violation.
I hope Salaam sues his ass off for libel.
