What happened to the Central Park 5 is this: five Black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were coerced into false confessions in 1989, convicted in 1990, imprisoned for between six and nearly twelve years, cleared by DNA evidence in 2002, and eventually paid roughly $45 million in combined settlements from New York City and New York State. Today they are men in their fifties who prefer the name the Exonerated Five. One sits on the New York City Council. Another runs a clothing brand. A third helped fund an Innocence Project center that bears his name. And in 2024 all five sued Donald Trump for defamation over statements he made about them during a presidential debate.
Who They Are and What They Were Accused Of
On the night of April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker at Salomon Brothers, was raped and beaten while jogging in the northern end of Central Park. She was found near a ravine with a fractured skull, severe blood loss, and hypothermia, and remained in a coma for twelve days. She never recovered any memory of the attack.
The same night, police were responding to reports of groups of teenagers harassing people in the park and detained dozens of them. Five were charged with the assault on Meili:
- Antron McCray, 15 (now Antron Brown)
- Kevin Richardson, 14
- Yusef Salaam, 15
- Raymond Santana, 14
- Korey Wise, 16
None of them had a meaningful criminal history. They were not a gang. Wise was at the precinct that night only because he had walked over with his friend Salaam after police picked Salaam up. That single decision would send him to adult prison for more than a decade.
How Police Got the Confessions
The case against the boys rested almost entirely on statements taken from them during interrogations lasting between fourteen and thirty hours. Detectives told the boys that hair evidence tied them to the victim, which was not true. They were kept from food, water, and sleep. Each was told the others had already named him.
Parents or guardians were absent from the most damaging portions of the questioning. In several cases, a parent was brought in only after hours of unrecorded interrogation, right before cameras were switched on to capture a final statement. The jury saw only those recorded statements, not the hours that produced them.
The confessions contradicted each other on where the attack happened, when it happened, who did what, and in what order. They also contradicted the physical evidence at the scene. No blood, no DNA, no fingerprints, and no fibers connected any of the five to Meili. Semen recovered from the crime scene did not match any of them.
The Convictions and What Each Man Served
Two trials in 1990 produced guilty verdicts for all five. The four younger defendants — McCray, Richardson, Salaam, and Santana — were sentenced as juveniles to five to ten years and served roughly six to seven years each before parole. Korey Wise, tried as an adult because he was sixteen, was sentenced to five to fifteen years and sent into the adult prison system, where he served about eleven and a half years.
Release did not end the punishment. The four juvenile defendants lived for years as registered sex offenders, carrying felony records into every job interview and apartment application. Their convictions were not vacated until 2002, meaning they spent years as free men still legally branded as rapists.
How They Were Exonerated
In early 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer already serving thirty-three years to life, told a corrections officer that he alone had attacked Trisha Meili in 1989. He provided details about the crime that had never been made public. DNA testing confirmed that the semen recovered from the scene matched Reyes and excluded all five convicted men. Reyes had committed another rape near Central Park two days before the Meili attack using the same method, a link investigators had never made.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office reinvestigated and, on December 5, 2002, filed a motion recommending that every conviction be vacated and every original indictment dismissed.1The Washington Post. CentralPark5 MotionToVacate On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the New York State Supreme Court signed the orders. The five were fully exonerated.
The Settlements
The men filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against New York City for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. The city fought the case for more than a decade under the Bloomberg administration. In 2014, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city agreed to a $41 million settlement, roughly $1 million for each year the men had collectively spent in prison. A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan gave final approval on September 5, 2014. In 2016, New York State paid an additional $3.9 million through the Court of Claims, bringing the total to approximately $44.9 million.
Where Each of Them Is Now
Yusef Salaam won election to the New York City Council in November 2023, representing District 9 in Harlem, the same neighborhood where he grew up. He took office on January 1, 2024, and won re-election in November 2025.2Ballotpedia. Yusef Salaam
Raymond Santana co-founded a clothing brand called Park Madison NYC and speaks at schools about wrongful conviction and the criminal justice system.
Korey Wise, who served the longest sentence, donated a portion of his settlement to the Innocence Project, which named a center in his honor.
Antron McCray, now Antron Brown, and Kevin Richardson have maintained more private lives. All five appear together regularly at public events focused on criminal justice reform.
The 2024 Defamation Lawsuit Against Donald Trump
Two weeks after the arrests, in May 1989, Donald Trump had taken out full-page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in connection with the case.3DocumentCloud. Trump’s Central Park Five Ad in Newsday He has never apologized for those ads, and the case resurfaced during the 2024 presidential campaign.
At a televised debate on September 10, 2024, Trump made statements about the five that they say were false: that they had pleaded guilty (none did), that a victim had been killed (no one died), and that the mayor at the time had agreed with his death-penalty position (the mayor in 1989 was Ed Koch, who did not).
On October 21, 2024, all five filed a civil defamation lawsuit against Trump in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, alleging the debate statements were “false, misleading and defamatory” and had caused severe emotional distress and reputational damage. Trump moved to dismiss. In June 2025, a federal judge denied the motion, and the lawsuit is proceeding.
What the Case Changed
New York passed a law named after the Central Park Five requiring police to videotape all interrogations of minors, aimed directly at the failure that produced the original confessions: hours of unrecorded questioning that a jury never saw.4New York State Senate. New Central Park Five Law Requires Cops Videotape Interrogations of Minors
In 2019, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries When They See Us dramatized the case and was watched by more than 23 million accounts. On December 19, 2022, the twentieth anniversary of the exoneration, Central Park dedicated the Gate of the Exonerated at 110th Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Fifth Avenue, near the neighborhood where the five grew up. It was the first entrance name added to the park since 1862.5Central Park Conservancy. Gate of the Exonerated