The Truth About the Central Park Five | Larry Elder Show
|
Time
Text
You probably didn't watch the Emmys.
The ratings were awful.
Well, I watched them so you didn't have to.
And here's what happened.
But most importantly, this is for the men that we know as the Exonerated Five.
It's for Raymond, Yusuf, Antron, Kevin, and King Corey Wise!
Thank you so much.
It's an honor.
It's a blessing.
One slight problem.
The Central Park Five?
We're guilty.
Of course, that's not the conclusion that Ken Burns reached in his documentary.
But you'd think their spidey sense would go off for a thousand different reasons.
That they didn't know where the crime had taken place.
They were in some other place when it did.
It was an incredibly bloody crime scene.
There's nothing of the crime scene on the boys.
There's nothing of the boys on the crime scene.
They didn't know each other.
They spent all this time in prison not asking for parole.
I mean, when they went up for parole, not saying, I did it so they could get out earlier.
And film, I have to say, and Charlie, you know this, is a kind of polygraph.
You read it after a couple of hours.
We go in and we let you decide.
And you see these were good kids, that they hadn't done it.
And then there's the Ava DuVernay TV miniseries called When They See Us, which makes the same claim.
Innocent men railroaded by a racist criminal justice system.
Is my mom here?
It's just us.
You and us.
Who you were in the park with?
I don't know names.
I just got lost.
Where did you see the lady?
What lady?
The female jogger was severely beaten and raped.
Every black male who was in the park last night is a suspect.
I need all of them.
Now, neither Ken Burns nor Ava DuVernay interviewed the lead detective in the case.
His name is Eric Reynolds.
But I did.
Hey, Larry, thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this and set the record straight.
Well, you were there that night.
Why don't you tell us what happened?
Well, to begin with, I'm listening to Ken Burns, and it's astounding to listen to him fabricate what went on that night.
Ken Burns, you know, I could never watch anything that he's produced anymore.
With any amount of confidence that he's telling the truth, that this is an honest betrayal of what's happened.
Now, Detective, you were there that night.
Did you and your partner arrest the people that became the Central Park Five, all five of them?
What happened was we were looking for the group of teenagers who were wilding, who were rioting.
I mean, and that's the best way to describe it.
They were rioting in the park.
We came upon...
Twenty to thirty of them after they had assaulted the teacher, John Lachlan, and beat him so badly that both of his eye sockets were shattered and his skull was cracked.
He wasn't even able to identify who it was that beat him because he couldn't see.
His head looked like it was dunked in a bucket of blood.
We captured five of the thirty that we observed.
Because the group, of course, started running when we went to apprehend them.
And two of the five were Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana, part of the Central Park Five.
And just so that you understand, as we observed the group, we observed, we watched Raymond Santana with Steven Lopez leading the group.
They were I could see them turning around and addressing them almost as though they were leading the pack and as they were walking uptown, up Central Park West.
Once we arrested them, you have to understand something.
We arrested them before the jogger was even found.
The jogger was still in the ravine.
She was by herself Oh, and did I mention that the lead detective in the case, Eric Reynolds, is black?
And what about those alleged civil rights abuses?
Detective, as you know, you are accused of forcing the confessions.
You're accused of not giving the boys the opportunity to be with their parents, not giving them food and water, not allowing them to use the restroom.
Linda Ferristein has been characterized as a racist.
And I want to give you an opportunity to address some of these distortions.
Were they really denied food, water, bathroom facilities, access to their parents?
Linda Ferrisdean was the lead prosecutor in the case, and she wrote an op-ed piece about this miniseries called When They See Us, in which she said it was full of lies.
She said the miniseries portrays the suspects of being held without food, deprived of their parents' company and advice, not even allowed to use a bathroom.
Nonsense.
If that were true, that would have been brought up at the hearing where they determined the confessions were voluntary.
It says that the film suggests the only evidence that they have against the suspect is their forced confessions, nonsense.
Not true.
One woman testified that one of them told her he held her down, probably thinking that holding her down meant that he was exonerated from crime.
She was wrong.
There were bloodstains and dirt on some of the other five, Linda Fairstein said.
There were statements made by more than a dozen other kids who participated in the park rampage, fingering the five.
And regarding the claim that Mateus Reyes solely was there...
She said, well, if he said he was solely there and the jury heard that, they probably wouldn't have convicted them regarding raping her or being involved in the rape of her, but they were also involved in attacking and insulting other people, so the other charges should not have been vacated.
The second lead prosecutor, Tim Clements, believes that Mateus Reyes is a complete liar and doesn't believe any of the charges should have been vacated.
The lead officer on this case is my guest, retired New York detective Eric Reynolds.
He's been on the force about 20 years.
That's correct.
Detective, again, when you watched the documentary that Ken Burns did, and your reaction to that documentary was what?
Oh, it's a complete farce.
Ken Burns himself said that he made the documentary for one reason, and that was to force the city to pay the lawsuit, to pay the Central Park Five money, and that's it.
That's why he would not show the city the outtakes from the filming that he did, because he didn't want people to see the contradictions, he didn't want people to see the lies, he didn't want people to see that they were clearly Involved in the attack on Patricia Miley, a.k.a.
the Central Park Jogger.
All you have to do is watch the videos.
Watch the videos in their entirety.
There's a website called centralpark5joggerattackers.com.
They have the videos there.
Watch them all.
Look to see if they're sleep deprived.
Look to see if they're deprived of going to the bathroom.
Look to see if they get their rights read to them.
Their rights are read right to them at the beginning.
Their parents are there.
They're not, you know, being kept from going to the bathroom or any of the nonsense that you've been fed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Ava DuVernay.
I also understand, Detective, that the daughter of Ken Burns worked with one of the lawyers following the lawsuit against the city.
Absolutely.
She worked for their attorneys.
If you read the book, because I read her book, which is just total nonsense.
One of the things she blames their conviction on is the Pan Am-Lockerby 103 bombing.
What the hell does that have to do with the Central Park Five?
A terrorist bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerby, Scotland.
It's practically ridiculous.
Another thing she mentioned is how she created this idea that New York City was the South in the 1980s.
It was the 50s segregated Jim Crow South.
Mississippi, yeah.
Yeah, patently ridiculous.
Patently ridiculous.
I don't know where she came up with this.
You know, it's...
I just can't believe how this case has turned around, and people believe the lives that they're being fed by Ken and Sarah Burns and by Ava DuVernay.
And by the way, Linda Fairstein never walked into a precinct And demanded that detectives go and round up every black man in Harlem.
I laughed out loud when I heard that.
I was like, you've got to be kidding me!
And I had to rewind it just to hear, to watch Felicity Huffman mouth those words.
And I was thinking, oh my God, here's a felon.
Felicity Huffman's a convicted felon doing this, you know, And was there evidence beyond their alleged coerced confessions?
Detective, we just got a phone call from someone who says both of us are wrong because of the lack of DNA that links the five to the rape of the Central Park Jogger.
To that, you say what, Detective?
Okay, then watch the videos.
Watch the confession videos.
All of the defendants said the exact same thing.
They were unable to get an erection to perform sexually when they were attacking her.
And if you think about it, you've got 20 or 30, 13 and 14 year olds in the middle of Central Park, in the middle of the night, beating the life out of this woman they don't even know.
How can you perform sexually under those conditions?
Look at the videos.
They say it.
Each one of them says the same thing.
They could not get an erection.
And you wouldn't expect them to under those circumstances.
Only one person who was with them could.
That was Mateus Reyes, the one who raped his mother, who was a serial rapist, who raped, tortured, and murdered a pregnant woman in front of her children.
Of course he can complete the act, because he's a psychopath.
Because he's disinhibited.
He doesn't have a conscience.
He doesn't have the ability to feel any type of compassion or any type of remorse for anything that he does.
So yes, he was able to complete the act.
The others weren't.
And they say as much when it happened.
It's on the video.
Detective, what about Mateus Reyes saying that he acted alone?
He's a pathological liar.
He's a psychopath.
Mateus Reyes said that he had proof that he did it by himself.
He claimed that he knows something no one else knows, that she had a fanny pack and a Walkman that he took from her.
No one else would know that.
And we didn't know about it, except for when Michael Armstrong did the reinvestigation of the case.
He found in court records notes taken by a detective from Carrie Weiss, Carrie Weiss, in 1989, on April 20th, said that when he was attacking the jogger, there was another guy named Rudy that, while he was raping her, took her Walkman and took her fanny pack.
This is documents that were made in 1989 that were provided to the court.
So in 1989, Terry Weiss knew about the Walkman and knew about the fanny pack, and Reyes claims no one else knows it but him.
Detective, also Linda Ferristein in her op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal said that there were bloodstains and dirt on the clothing of some of the five, also semen on the shirt of one of the other five.
That's correct.
It was pubic hair, there was blood, there was semen, there was grass.
The idea that there was no physical evidence on the five is a lie.
It was a lie perpetrated by Ken Burns and by Sarah Burns.
There's also medical evidence which conclusively shows that she was attacked by more than one person.
And the doctor who treated her, who was interviewed by Sarah Burns, Dr.
Robert Kurtz gave her almost an entire day interview, provided her with the medical records, and at the end of the day, she would not include his interview in her documentary.
And when she was asked about it by a reporter, she said specifically, I know Dr. Kurtz believes what he saw and that she was attacked by more than one person, but I don't believe it, so I left it out.
Wow.
Okay, this is a fact.
This is something that she said to a reporter.
It's out there.
All people have to do is just look for it.
And, Detective, in the case of Linda Fairstein, back to her op-ed piece, she says that these boys were not charged with rape.
They were charged with acting in concert, and the jury was informed that she was attacked by several people and that the people that attacked her and raped her got away.
That's correct.
When Elizabeth Lederow gave her her summation, and when we...
Tested the DNA, and by the way, all of their lawyers fought against us testing the DNA, which was in its infancy at the time.
It came back to someone who was not apprehended, which is not uncommon.
You have a gang rape.
You don't get everybody.
I saw 30 kids there, at least.
A large number of them got away.
We did not get everybody.
We knew we didn't get everybody.
Elizabeth Lederer told the jury, told the judge, the defense, the public, that we have DNA from an unknown suspect.
Somebody that participated in this rape got away.
And when the jury, which was very diverse, which had blacks, whites, gays, we had somebody who was with the NAACP, we had somebody who was, I believe he was a minister or a priest or something, They listened to the evidence.
They convicted them on the evidence.
They looked at the videotapes several times, more than once.
They looked for the coercion.
They looked for the sleep deprivation.
They looked for all the lies that were thrown, that's being thrown at people right now, and they did not see it.
And that's why they convicted them.
So the confessions were not coerced.
You can actually watch them on YouTube.
The boys were not denied access to food, to water, to their parents, to bathroom facilities.
They were convicted of evidence beyond just the confessions.
They were convicted of acting in concert.
Apart from that, Burns and DuVernay nailed it.
I think they think all confessions are sort of like this one.
Now you charge me with this and I'll beat it.
Okay?
Let's get back to the trucker.
Finally, Donald Trump, who also believes that Central Park Five were guilty, was asked whether or not he has changed his mind.
Here's what he said.
There were people on both sides of that.
They admitted their guilt.
If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case.
So we'll leave it at that.
Did you really think Donald Trump was going to change his mind?