The prosecutor who wrongly accused five black and brown boys of gang-raping and attacking a well-to-do white woman in Central Park 30 year ago is meriting the ire of the Internet with the release of Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series When They See Us.
Linda Fairstein, the 72-year-old lawyer turned crime novelist said to The Daily Beast DuVernay’s latest project “is a basket of lies”
In the days since the series’ premiere, a #cancellindafairsein hashtag has populated Twitter. Many have asked for her crime novels to be removed from retailer’s shelves, due to her gross mishandling of the Central Park 5 case. The Roots drummer, Questlove took to Twitter suggesting a deeper look into her prosecutorial past should be done.
Every single last case of hers should be re-examined #CancelLindaFairstein
— B.R.O.theR. ?uestion (@questlove) June 4, 2019
Prior to DuVernay’s film and after the exoneration of Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, and Korey Wise; even after Matias Reyes’ DNA and confession placed him at the scene of the crime, Fairstein still maintains the young men are guilty.
“Two juries heard that the DNA in and on the jogger’s body was not from any of the 5—and still they convicted on the theory that the missing attacker, who had run with the crowd of 32 young men who rioted in the park, had not yet been caught,” Fairstein wrote in a July 2018 New York Law Journal article.
When They See Us transports viewers back to New York City in 1989, where five boys were arrested, instructed to lie on another, coerced into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit and then sentenced to prison. It wouldn’t be until 2002 when the real attacker admitted to the heinous crime that their sentences were vacated, More than a decade later in 2014 that the group received a $41 million settlement from the city.
The five men still haven’t received an apology.
