This is significant because it hints that law enforcement officers had already made up their minds about the teens' character and presumed guilt even though Kevin came from a two-parent home with a disciplinarian father and was, of course, innocent of the crimes levied at him. True: In The Central Park Five, a documentary by award-winning documentarian Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah, Kevin Richardson notes the police called him an animal as they collared him. Truth or fiction? The night Trisha Meili was raped in Central Park, April 19, 1989, police officers called the (innocent) boys, including Kevin, "animals" as they captured them. When They See Us Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix So what's true and what's Hollywood fiction? Here's a breakdown of some of the biggest moments. The details are so incredulous and the emotion so intense, it's reasonable while watching to wonder if it all went down as portrayed.
An emotional minefield from start to finish, When They See Us will likely cause outrage and anguish among viewers unable to conceive how prosecutors manufactured a case with no evidence, and how the news media bought the story without ever questioning police accounts. When They See Us depicts in devastating detail not only how the boys were sentenced to six to 13 years in prison before being exonerated when the true perpetrator came forward, but it also shows how the young men, known as the Central Park 5, had their childhoods stolen, families torn apart, development stunted, and mental health compromised because of this case. As its ( revised) title implies, the four-part Netflix miniseries forces viewers to see the accused - 14-year-olds Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez) and Kevin Richardson ( Asante Blackk) 15-year-olds Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse) and Antron McCray ( Caleel Harris) and 16-year-old Korey Wise ( Moonlight's Jharrell Jerome) - as children, unlawfully coerced into giving false testimony about a rape in Central Park and the catastrophic aftermath those confessions had on their lives.ĭiscover your new favorite show: Watch This Now! Image: Getty/Netflix.When They See Us, Ava DuVernay's cinematic retelling of the wrongful rape and assault conviction of five teenage New Yorkers in 1989, hurts to watch. The real life Elizabeth Lederer and actress Vera Farmiga. In a 2002 interview with The New Yorker, she described the arrests of the suspects as “one of the most brilliant police investigations I’ve ever seen," People reports. In 2018, after New York City released thousands of pages of case documents supporting the decision to vacate the convictions, Fairstein wrote an op-ed in the New York Law Journal defending the initial convictions and saying the confessions weren’t coerced. To this day, she maintains her defence of the Central Park Five prosecution. She then went on to write 20 mystery novels, sales from which have made her millions. Linda Fairstein was the Head of the Manhattan Sex Crimes unit who led the investigation into the Central Park Five.Įven with no conclusive evidence to suggest the teenagers had anything to do with Trisha Meili's sexual assault, Fairstein refused to pursue other suspects, ordering the coercion of the boys' confessions under extreme duress.įairstein held her position as the Head of the Sex Crimes unit until 2002, the same year Reyes confessed to raping Meili and all five previous convictions were overturned. You can watch the trailer for When They See Us below, post continues after video. These boys from Harlem became known as the Central Park Five, and are the real life people behind Netflix’s new four-part miniseries When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay. Of that group, five boys were arrested over the rape and attempted murder of Meili aka the Central Park jogger.Īntron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The same night, a large group of Black and Latino youths were caught terrorising people in another area of Central Park. She was found in the early hours of April 18 she’d been raped, sodomised and beaten near death.
The 28-year-old wouldn’t make it out of the park on her own. On the night of April 17, 1989, Trisha Meili set off on her usual jogging route through New York’s Central Park. This is the disturbing true story behind the Central Park Five. She brought the five men Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise – known as the Central Park Five and now referred to as the Exonerated Five – to the 2019 Emmy Awards as her dates, just as she promised.
Ava DuVernay’s four-part Netflix miniseries When They See Us was nominated for 16 Emmys.
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