Donald Trump, now the president-elect, has spent 35 years demonizing five Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongfully convicted for a pair of attacks and a rape in New York's Central Park in 1989.
It doesn't matter to Trump that those convictions were vacated in 2002. He was indignant when New York in 2014 paid the "Exonerated Five" $41 million to settle a lawsuit, with an admission from the city that called it "a moral obligation to right this injustice."
Trump wanted them held accountable 35 years ago and still talks that way about them now, long after their names have been cleared. The flip side to that – Trump now insists he can't be held accountable for what he says about them.
Trump on Tuesday asked a federal judge to set in motion the process to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the five men after he made obviously false claims about them during the Sept. 10 presidential debate.
And he's using a Pennsylvania law specifically designed to prevent wealthy and powerful people from filing frivolous but expensive lawsuits to drain the resources of critics as a way of silencing them. Those are known as "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or SLAPP suits.
The Pennsylvania legislator who helped strengthen his state's anti-SLAPP suit law this year told me Trump is trying to apply it here in exactly the opposite way that it was intended to be used.
Karin Sweigart,........