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Propaganda Posing as Documentary

The new Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, brings the Central Park Five back into the limelight.

The Five were convicted of brutally gang raping a white jogger in 1989. Four were black, one Hispanic, and all were between the ages of 14 and 16. The case dominated New York City headlines and inspired Donald Trump to pay for pro-death penalty ads in the New York Times.

In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes claimed sole responsibility. Mr. Reyes’s DNA was the only match to evidence from the crime scene. The state vacated the Five’s rape convictions, and in 2014, New York City awarded them $41 million. Liberals claim the case proves America’s justice system is racist. Yet many have shown there is plenty of evidence the suspects were involved in the crime.

When They See Us ignores that evidence. For black filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the Five were railroaded by police racism and a criminal prosecution.

The original incident took place on April 19, 1989, when more than 30 young blacks and Hispanics descended on Central Park for an evening of “wilding.” In the series they are just running through the park, having a good time.

Not so. “People were punched in the face and pulled off their bicycles and robbed of their watches,” says New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. They beat one white school teacher so badly police said he looked like he had been “dunked in a bucket of blood.”

The series does show a few people assaulting two people, but the Five are appalled and don’t join in. Brutal police officers chase and catch most of the suspects. One smashes 14-year-old Kevin Richardson’s face with a helmet.

Soon after the arrests, police find Patricia Meili, the raped jogger, almost dead. Sex crimes investigator Linda Fairstein suspects the young men attacked her and orders the police to get confessions. Police use physical force, lie, threaten, and deny food and toilet breaks. The suspects eventually break and confess to the rape; all but one confesses on camera.

Naturally, the justice system is racist. Outmatched in court, outwitted by racist cops, badly served by bungling lawyers, the Five are convicted because of the taped confessions. Four go to juvenile detention, and 16-year-old, Korey Wise, goes to adult prison. Five good-natured boys’ dreams are crushed by a vicious system.

The main villain is Linda Fairstein, an arrogant, blond-haired white woman who ignores evidence to get convictions. She’s what blacks call a “Beckzilla:” a white woman using her “privilege” to destroy non-whites. Miss DuVernay’s miniseries is so effective that the real Linda Fairstein lost her book publisher because of When They See Us—though she has now written her own defense against the series’ reckless portrayal.

The other villain is Donald Trump. He appears in old television interviews about the death penalty ads. The show insists he is racist and partly responsible for the unjust verdict. He personifies America’s racism and injustice.

The actors don’t look like the suspects. The short actor playing then-14-year-old Kevin Richardson looks younger than 14. Mr. Richardson looked much older than 14 in 1989, and was taller than his arresting officers. The series portrays the other four similarly.

The show claims the teenagers learned about the rape during interrogation, but some had mentioned it unprompted earlier. One said he “didn’t do the murder” but he knew who did (initially, the jogger was expected to die). Mr. Richardson told police “Antron [McCray] did it” before authorities even knew about the rape. In response to a joke that he should be out with his girlfriend, one teenager told a cop he “already got some.” As Raymond Santana was driven from one police station to another, he told police, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel her tits.” A friend of Mr. Wise said he told her he held the victim down but did not rape her.

None of this is in the series, in which The Five stoutly deny they were involved.

In the series, the “wilding” is good-natured fun, but the Five were convicted of assaults that still stand. In a 2002 story casting doubt on the rape convictions, The Village Voice wrote:

It is important to remember, in any examination of the public record of this flawed investigation and prosecution, that even if these five youths, or at least some of them, were not guilty of rape or sexual assault, they were not innocents—having been convicted of a whole series of other crimes committed in the rampage that night. One need only recall that among those crimes, two men, John Loughlin and Antonio Diaz, were horribly beaten and left bleeding and unconscious.

One of The Five, Yusef Salam, testified in court that he brought a 14-inch metal pipe—a weapon used in the attackers—to the park that night, but the series downplays the “wilding.” In court, a stereotypical “Becky” complains that young blacks made weird sounds as she and her husband bicycled past them. The blacks in the audience guffaw at what is portrayed as petty and racist. In fact, Patricia Malone was almost raped. “It was actually terrifying,” she told ABC News last month. “They were ripping at my arms and legs and clothing. As a woman, you immediately wonder what’s going to happen.” She and her husband managed to get away.

The film gives a false impression of Mr. Wise’s time in prison. According to police, he became a prison gang leader. In the series, he is brutalized by gangs but never joins one.

There are also questions about the relationship between Mr. Wise, and the confessed rapist, Matias Reyes. Authorities think Mr. Wise’s gang may have intimidated Mr. Reyes into claiming sole responsibility. The two got into a fight early in Mr. Wise’s prison term, but in the series this is a dispute over a television.

The series claims Mr. Reyes decided to confess because of his new-found Christian faith, but police are skeptical. His past crimes included an attempted rape in a church. Mr. Reyes was already serving a life sentence for a brutal rape and murder, so an additional conviction made little difference to him.

The show treats Mr. Reyes’s confession as absolute fact, but this story is thin. He claims he caught the jogger on his own. Police doubted this because Miss Meili kept a 7-and-a-half-minute mile pace for her run; Mr. Reyes was chubby and unathletic. Mr. Reyes also claimed he attacked Miss Meili with a tree branch and a rock. She had what looked like cut wounds, but Mr. Reyes said he didn’t use a knife.

The doctors who saved the jogger’s life thought a group of men attacked her. Dr. Robert Kurtz told The Wall Street Journal in 2014 that “there had to be another individual or a group who inflicted injuries with a sharp-edged instrument if he [Reyes] only used a blunt object.” Dr. Jane Haher said there were visible handprints on Miss Meili’s thighs, calves, ankles, and behind her knees. She thinks “people held her legs down while somebody did this horrible act.”

At the time of the trial, authorities knew that at least one attacker had not been caught. As Central Park Five prosecutor Tim Clements explained to the New York Daily News last year, “We told the jury that the DNA that had been analyzed matched someone else. When Reyes came forward it was a relief. . . It’s not surprising that he (perhaps) was with this group or joined it later.”

Mr. Clements thinks the state should not have vacated the Five’s convictions: “I thought there were a lot of factual inaccuracies and some of the logic and the conclusions were faulty. The facts and the law supported the convictions. I was very disappointed that they vacated the convictions without even a hearing, without even an opportunity to question and examine Reyes.”

In When They See Us, aggressive white cops force the suspects to confess. The case’s lead officer, Eric Reynolds—who is black—strongly disputes this. “There was no coercion,” he told the New York Daily News in 2018. “If they all said the same exact things, then maybe I would think that. But they didn’t. Look at the video statements. They stand up and demonstrate [what happened].”

He also noted that the statements were obtained while Miss Meili was in a coma: “If we’re railroading them, how do we know when she comes out of the coma what story she’s going to tell? If you are trying to pin it on someone, why would you risk that she would say something different?”

Mr. Reynolds does not even appear in the series.

The prosecutor, Mr. Clements, also says there was no coercion. “Liz [Lederer, the lead prosecutor] was doing interviews in a room with an open ceiling,” he told the Daily News. “My job was to make sure everyone was quiet so the interviews wouldn’t be interrupted. There were parents present. In that situation, you can’t coach them, you can’t tell them what to do.”

The New York City Police Department re-investigated the case in 2002 and concluded there was no coercion. In the series, the main trick police use is to convince the suspects that if they confess to rape they can go home. Even a low-IQ 14-year-old knows that isn’t true. Why did the Five confess when the other suspects did not?

Mr. Reynolds, like many involved in the case, is incensed that the city settled without a trial. “If we had gone to trial in their lawsuit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because all the facts would have come out,” he said. “It would have been clear they participated and Reyes didn’t act alone. The evidence supported it. They [the Central Park Five] did not want to go to trial. They just wanted to get paid.”

Prosecutor Clements also thinks that if there had been a new trial, the Five would have lost.

Another person who doesn’t like the settlement is the victim. “I so wish the case hadn’t been settled,” Miss Meili told ABC last month. “I wish that it had gone to court because there’s a lot of information that’s now being released that I’m seeing for the first time.” She still believes she was attacked by a group.

Of course, When They See Us leaves all this out. It has a simple message: our racist justice system framed five innocent young persons of color. It is propaganda posing as a documentary.

Imagine an anti-LGBTQ gathering that included remarks by a trio of aggressively anti-gay activists—Scott Lively, Peter LaBarbera, and Brian Camenker—and now imagine that none of them was the most ridiculous, obnoxious or extreme speaker. Such was the scene at the National Press Club on Tuesday afternoon, where a new group calling itself “Gone Too Far” introduced itself with tirades against the LGBTQ equality movement, the proposed federal Equality Act, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus who support it.

Three right-wing African American pastors—Randy Short, Stephen Broden and E.W. Jackson—are part of the group’s organizing committee, as are Lively, LaBarbera, and Camenker. (Notably, the latter three were all part of a group of Religious Right leaders who defended Rep. Steve King when he was punished by his House colleagues for his most recent racist comments.) Additional organizing committee members include Arthur Shaper, head of the California branch of Camenker’s MassResistance; Paul Blair, president of Reclaiming America for Christ; and his Oklahoma clergy colleague, Dan Fisher. Blair is also a promoter of “nullification”–the notion that the individual states hold the power to nullify federal laws.

The press conference began with the blowing of a shofar, prayer, the singing of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “God Bless America,” and the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. When Short took to the podium, things went downhill quickly.

“Today is a day that we declare war on those who are ungodly, unbiblical and wicked,” said Short, who is from the D.C. area and who is listed as “coordinator” of Gone Too Far on a press release. “We are sick and tired of all the deviants, all the eugenicists, all the homophiles coming out of the closet to destroy this country.” Short was particularly outraged that members of the Congressional Black Caucus, with the exception of Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, have endorsed the Equality Act, which Short called “the pedophile bill.”

“We have a group that nobody wants that has decided like a parasite to hook itself to the history and legacy of the African American people,” he said.

Short, whose Facebook page denounces “CBC QOONS,” called members of the Black Caucus “a group of infamous fakers, haters, takers, liars, excuse-makers” who “have auctioned the future of our black babies for the sodomite agenda and for the pedophile or the minor-attracted person agenda.”

“I want to say to you,” said Short, “that the Congressional Black Caucus is the equivalent of a terminal venereal disease on the body of black people in this country, and they cannot take a stand against our people being wiped out.”

Short went after iconic CBC members by name. He declared Maxine Waters to be a “fraud,” adding there is “nothing black about her—her wig is from Korea.” Of civil rights hero John Lewis, he asked, “What closet are you in, boy? They didn’t beat you enough in the 60s for you to turn on God, turn on your people, turn on morality, turn on the black woman, turn on the black unborn, turn on the black children.” Short called on them all to resign.

Saying, “We don’t need a Hitler; we’ve got LGBTQ,” Short suggested that the equality movement is a conspiracy to spread diseases to the black community and “wipe out an unwanted population of people through immorality.”

Those people who should know better, who call themselves minority leaders—who know that bowel movement and the blood shed at Edmund Pettus Bridge don’t come together. We’ve got another epidemic brought to us that’s covered up—shingles. Folks sick because folks eat bowel movement in the sexual acts they have, and now they’re injecting children, giving them these diseases, calling it vaccines, because Big Pharma makes so much money off of the new odd diseases that come out of the conduct of these folks.

Short had an odd question for the audience: “Can anyone prove that all the slaveholders were heterosexual?” And he had an answer:

You can’t scientifically prove that. So didn’t some of these gays, even though they didn’t procreate way back then, didn’t they own our people? Who was raping the boys on the plantations? What is ‘breaking the buck?’ Why don’t we know that on the plantations, black men were raped by gay white men to break them down, and now we’re unified with them, and gay is the new black? Have you lost your mind?

One of the few people Short had any kind words for was Anita Bryant, who he said was right for her anti-gay-rights crusade in the 1970s. “God bless Anita Bryant,” he said.

A cursory online search turns up other examples of Short’s unusual worldview, including a 2014 statement attributed to him that asserted, “I will always love Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Next up was Broden of Dallas, Texas, who said during his failed 2010 congressional campaign that the violent overthrow of the government should be an option “on the table” for dealing with government tyranny.

Like Short, Broden made much of language in the Equality Act, saying that the purpose of the bill is “to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation—and for other purposes.” Broden implied that “other purposes” opens the door to the potential protection of pedophilia and bestiality by civil rights laws.

Broden said the “sinister” Equality Act would encroach on religious liberty and free speech, and would essentially transfer protections of the civil rights struggle to “wealthy white men.” Said Broden. “It is the gateway to a moral depravity that will ultimately destroy this nation.”

Following Broden to the microphone was Dan Fisher, who promoted Gone Too Far’s “Proclamation for Morality.” The proclamation spends a lot of time talking about sexually transmitted diseases, anal sex, pedophilia and, of course, the horrors of Drag Queen Story Hours.

“All truth is God’s truth,” Fisher said. “And his truth applies to all people at all times and in all places. There is not one truth for men and another for women, one for blacks and another for whites, one for heterosexuals, and another for those identifying as LGBTQ.” God alone, he said, has the authority to define and regulate sexuality and marriage.

“If Congress attempts to label as a civil right that which has been understood by generations as immoral, it would not only be reversing centuries of western Judeo-Christian thought, but would be in essence, as Pastor Broden said, actually rendering historic, orthodox Christianity illegal,” Fisher said.

Next up was Stephen Black, who runs a ministry for “sexually and relationally broken people.” Black said God saved him from his gay-identified “years in darkness” and he denounced efforts by LGBTQ activists to ban conversion therapy for minors. He said the term “gay Christian” is “heresy.”

Scott Lively, the notorious globe-trotting anti-LGBTQ activist and author of “The Pink Swastika,” followed Black at the mic. (Lively ran unsuccessfully last year for the Republican nomination for governor of Massachusetts.) At the Gone Too Far event, he took special aim at the Equality Act, anti-discrimination legislation that was introduced in the 115th Congress. The Equality Act, Lively said, is not really about equality but about “LGBT supremacy.”

Lively denounced former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of landmark gay-rights rulings, as “the worst enemy of the family in the history of the Supreme Court.” Lively charged that the Equality Act was meant to accomplish what he said was the LGBT movement’s goal of abolishing laws governing the age of sexual consent, as well as the legalization of prostitution and polygamy. He also said that that the transgender movement is really about promoting the “pedophilia agenda.”

After Lively came Peter LaBarbera, famed for his fondness for chronicling leather/fetish events in lurid detail as head of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. Lively became part of Camenker’s growing MassResistance organization last year, and at this week’s press conference, he promoted the group’s tome on “the health hazards of homosexuality.”

LaBarbera said the LGBTQ movement is an anti-God, anti-normal, anti-truth, anti-moral, anti-freedom “revolution” being led by people who are “desperate to rationalize their sin.” He said gay rights activists are “accelerating their war on the church because the church, the Christian church mainly, is the last bastion of opposition to this revolution.”

Camenker wasn’t at the speaker’s table but was given a minute at the end of the press conference to say how “thrilled” he is to be part of the Gone Too Far effort. At an anti-gay gathering in 2015, Camenker said that God has “very brutal” rules for dealing with people who want to tear down the moral structure of society: they “must be destroyed.”

During a Q&A period, Broden said the Equality Act is part of a “dark, evil sinister plot to destroy America.” Tapping another right-wing conspiracy theory, Broden said the Act’s origins go back to the development of “Cultural Marxism” in Germany in the 1920s. Lively also spoke about Cultural Marxism, which he said was another name for secular humanism, which he said was a religion that elite establishment Republicans and Democrats share.

Asked by a conservative activists about Trump, who waved a rainbow flag on the campaign trail, Lively defended the president, saying he cuts Trump some slack for not doing more because he “still does not have control of the government” due to deep state activists who have their claws and tentacles dug into the Defense and State departments. “Donald Trump is God’s man in the White House,” Lively declared.

Gone Too Far is promoting “God’s Voice,” a conference being held in Oklahoma City on February 22 and 23 that is described as “a biblical response to the queering of the church.” LaBarbera and Black are among the scheduled speakers, along with radio host Janet Mefferd.

Excerpts from Randy Short’s comments at the Gone Too Far press conferenc