Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise raped a white woman jogging in New York’s Central Park in 1989. He was a teenager when he was charged with battery. Five people, who are black and Latino, said they confessed to the crimes under duress. They later recanted in court, pleading not guilty, and were later found guilty after a jury trial. Their convictions were overturned in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.
After the crime, Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the teens to be executed. The jogging incident was Trump’s first foray into the tough-on-crime politics that heralded him as a full-fledged populist political figure. Since then, dog whistles and overtly racist rhetoric have become a fixture of Trump’s public life.
