Linda Fairstein and Yusef Salaam—their names emerge from the mists of semi-recent New York history. Their fates became linked on April 19, 1989, when the woman who became known as the Central Park jogger was assaulted. Fairstein was a prosecutor in the case, Salaam a defendant. She won a conviction; he went to prison. But in the years that followed, they have all but changed places, with their lives and reputations following contrasting sine curves.
Today, Fairstein lives in a kind of exile on a small island off the west coast of Florida. Salaam, who was ultimately cleared in the jogger case, shakes hands at subway stops in Harlem nearly every morning, with the same practiced pitch: “I’m Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five. I’m running for City Council, and I’d like your support.” Election Day is June 27.
At the time of the jogger case, Fairstein was something very rare: a famous civil servant. She had joined Robert Morgenthau’s Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 1972 and four years later took charge of the sex-crimes unit, which under her leadership went from 4 prosecutors to 40 and became a national model. Fairstein was a feminist hero—a pioneer in bringing spousal-rape cases as well as sex crimes when the victims were prostitutes. Her work helped inspire Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Bill Clinton weighed whether to make her attorney general. She had a happy marriage to Justin Feldman, a prominent lawyer and Democratic activist, and her life included a rich mix of visits to crime scenes and summers on Martha’s Vineyard.
In all, then, it was not a surprise that when a young woman was found bleeding and near death in a remote part of Central Park, Fairstein was called up to lead the investigation.
Fairstein was a feminist hero—a pioneer in bringing spousal-rape cases as well as sex crimes when the victims were prostitutes. Her work helped inspire Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The events of that April 19 have been exhaustively chronicled in subsequent years. In short, on that evening, about 30 young people were running together around the park. Some of them, clearly, were making trouble, though the widely used term for their activities—“wilding”— appears to have been a tabloid invention. Between roughly 10 p.m. and midnight, some in the group threw rocks at and otherwise assaulted strollers, bike riders, and joggers in the park. One man was knocked unconscious. Two teenagers—Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, both 14 years old—as well as a number of other youths, were arrested shortly after those attacks.
At about 1:30 a.m., passersby discovered the jogger in a wooded area near the 102nd Street Transverse. Her body temperature was in the mid-80s, and she had lost three-quarters of her blood. She would remain in a coma for 12 days and never have any recollection of who attacked her. Later, on April 20, based on information from those first arrested, Korey Wise (16), Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam (both 15) were brought in for questioning. Starting on the night of April 20, at a pair of police-precinct houses, Fairstein participated in the questioning of the suspects along with Elizabeth Lederer, who would become lead prosecutor in the case, and several New York police detectives.Over many hours of interrogation, the five boys implicated themselves—in a way. None of the five admitted raping the jogger, but several said they saw their co-defendants doing so. Their statements were inconsistent with one another—in terms of who did what—but the interrogations did suggest some kind of group wrongdoing.
There was abundant physical evidence at the crime scene—blood, hair, and fibers, even a sock with traces of semen. The use of DNA evidence was in its infancy in those days, but one thing was clear from the start: the evidence at the scene did not come from any of the five youths. It all came from some other, unknown person.
As the District Attorney’s Office later acknowledged, “Ultimately, there proved to be no physical or forensic evidence recovered at the scene or from the person or effects of the victim which connected the defendants to the attack on the jogger, or could establish how many perpetrators participated.”
Her body temperature was in the mid-80s, and she had lost three-quarters of her blood. She would remain in a coma for 12 days and never have any recollection of who attacked her.
Still, Fairstein’s unit decided to proceed with a prosecution of the five anyway. As the D.A. later put it, “the People’s case at both trials rested almost entirely on the statements made by the defendants.”
The Trump Card
Donald Trump shadowed the jogger case from the beginning, as part of his political coming of age. In 1989, Trump was known mostly as a louche and loud real-estate developer, but shortly after the arrests of the Central Park Five, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City newspapers, decrying “the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh at her family’s anguish.” Trump’s answer (in all caps) was: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.” Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric raised the already high racial temperature around the case.
From the beginning, many New Yorkers asked why the fate of the jogger—who was described initially only as a white, 28-year-old investment banker with degrees from Wellesley and Yale and who later identified herself as Patricia Meili—so transfixed the media, when women of color were often victims of similar crimes and didn’t attract a fraction of the attention. In this fevered atmosphere, Fairstein’s unit brought the five to trial. It was a close case—the jury deliberated for 10 days—but they were all found guilty. Salaam, who was convicted of rape and assault, was sentenced to 5 to 10 years; the others received similar sentences.
“People in prison turn into monsters because they have to survive,” Salaam, who is now 49 years old, told me. “I saw people cycle in and out. I saw fathers in prison, and then I saw their sons come through the same walls to join them. That was the worst.” For Salaam, the scariest moments came when, at age 21, he was moved out of juvenile detention and into the feared adult prison in upstate Clinton, New York. “Fortunately, I was adopted by a group of my Muslim brothers, who told me I was a political prisoner, and they kept me safe.”
Salaam was released in 1997, after serving nearly seven years. He returned to his native Harlem, found menial work and, for a while, an apartment, but life wasn’t easy. “When I came back here from prison, I couldn’t afford my apartment,” Salaam told me. “I remember that big, orange eviction sticker on my door. I remember the shame I felt when my neighbors saw that.” He later moved to Georgia, married and divorced, and had the first of what are now 10 children, who range in age from 7 to 27.
While Salaam and the others served out their terms and then struggled to build new lives, Fairstein’s career soared to greater heights. While still an assistant district attorney, she started writing crime thrillers, with a protagonist based on herself, and several became best-sellers. In 2001, she won the Nero Award for the best mystery of the year for her book The Deadhouse, and she retired from the D.A.’s office the following year. That was when the wheel began to turn.
Salaam, who was convicted of rape and assault, was sentenced to 5 to 10 years; the others received similar sentences.
In early 2002, Matias Reyes, an inmate at the upstate Auburn prison, had a chance encounter with Korey Wise, the oldest of the Five, who was doing his time in the same prison. The meeting triggered some unease for Reyes, because he knew that Wise was innocent. Reyes confessed to a prison guard that he alone had raped Meili in the park in 1989. The guard sent word through channels to the District Attorney’s Office, which began a re-investigation of the case. Reyes’s story checked out in every detail. His DNA matched the residue on the sock. This was a painful reckoning for Morgenthau’s office, because Reyes was himself a notorious New York criminal. He was known in the tabloids as the “East Side Slasher,” who committed a series of rapes near where Meili had been assaulted and around the same time.
Incredibly, police and prosecutors were so obsessed with the Central Park Five that they failed at the time even to consider that Reyes was the real culprit in the jogger case. Based on Reyes’s confession, and its abundant corroboration by the physical evidence at the scene, the D.A. moved to vacate all the defendants’ convictions in December 2002.
Injustice Denied
The exoneration of the Central Park Five left Fairstein with a dilemma. In a lengthy affidavit supporting the motion to dismiss the cases against the Five, Nancy Ryan, a top aide to Morgenthau, said the office had made a good-faith mistake in bringing the case. As she put it in the affidavit, “It could be, and it was, credibly, honestly, and persuasively argued by the prosecution that in any gang attack, discrepancies among accounts and confusion about details are not unusual.” But Ryan, speaking for Morgenthau, said that the interests of justice required that prosecutors acknowledge that they were wrong and that the Five were innocent. Fairstein could have done the same: admit that the confessions were flawed, Reyes was the sole perpetrator, and then gone on with her life.
Instead, Fairstein came up with her own theory of the case—that the Five were still guilty, because they acted in concert with Reyes. “We had to use special ‘youth rooms,’” she told me in an interview for The New Yorker in 2002.
“It was a much more friendly atmosphere, not the bare interrogation rooms. Nobody under sixteen was talked to until a parent or guardian arrived. Every kid was in an open space, no handcuffs. This was not an Alabama jail where two guys who have been partners for years put a guy in a back room, and he doesn’t see the light of day for three days. Three of the five went home and had a night’s sleep before they were ever taken into custody. For most of them, the substance of their admissions came out within about an hour of the time they came in. The consistency from their original admissions to the police, to their written statements, to the final video is really remarkable.” She continued, “I think Reyes ran with that pack of kids. He stayed longer when the others moved on. He completed the assault. I don’t think there is a question in the minds of anyone present during the interrogation process that these five men were participants, not only in the other attacks that night but in the attack on the jogger.” (A cursory report commissioned by the New York Police Department, as a response to Ryan’s affidavit, reached a similar, though less definitive, conclusion.)
In interviews and op-ed pieces, Fairstein made herself the spokeswoman, along with Trump, for the idea that Morgenthau’s office had wimped out and that the Central Park Five were guilty after all.
From the beginning, Salaam was always the most recognizable and prominent of the Five. Even as a teenager, he was over six feet tall, with a distinctive flattop haircut, and he delivered a rap about his innocence in court on the day of his sentencing. After the exoneration, Salaam began to come into his own. He returned to Harlem, re-married, became a motivational speaker, a board member of the Innocence Project, and the author of a well-regarded memoir, Better, Not Bitter: The Power of Hope and Living on Purpose. Today, he still speaks in the gauzy idiom of wellness and self-help. “We have to climb out of the gravitational pull of all the negatives that pull us down,” he told me. “We want our children to be our wildest dreams, not our wildest nightmares.”
Still, Salaam drops the relentless positivity when the subject turns to his prosecutors, especially Fairstein. “Elizabeth Lederer was the face of the prosecution, but Linda Fairstein was the lead. They manufactured a narrative that did not match the known facts,” he told me. “They argue that they were just doing their jobs, but they were not doing their jobs. They hated us because of the color of our skin and because we were from Harlem. What she did was atrocious. It’s the worst example of what a prosecutor should do. When it comes to the Linda Fairsteins of the world, they all too often turn a blind eye to the truth. It was a sex story—five brutes attacked a white woman.”
Fairstein made herself the spokeswoman, along with Trump, for the idea that Morgenthau’s office had wimped out and that the Central Park Five were guilty after all.
For Fairstein, the exoneration of the Five was little more than background noise—for a time. Then, in 2012, Ken Burns, his daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon, debuted The Central Park Five, a television documentary that meticulously detailed the facts of the assault and investigation, demolishing the claim that the Five had anything to do with the attack on Meili. (In a tweet, Trump said, “The Central Park Five documentary was a one-sided piece of garbage that didn’t explain the horrific crimes of these young men while in park.”)
Two years after the Burns film came out, the city settled a wrongful-prosecution lawsuit with the Five for $41 million. Salaam received $7 million. Trump promptly wrote an op-ed piece for the Daily News calling the settlement the “heist of the century.” He continued, “Settling doesn’t mean innocence. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.” Later, as president, Trump was asked about the case and said at the White House, “You have 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 never should have settled that case.”
The Blame Game
The turning point for Fairstein came in 2019, when Netflix broadcast When They See Us, a four-part dramatization of the Central Park story written, directed, and produced by Ava DuVernay and co-written by Attica Locke. Unlike the Burns documentary, which hewed to the known facts, the Netflix film took liberties with the story for dramatic purposes. In this version, Fairstein was the central villain. (She was played by Felicity Huffman, shortly before she was implicated and ultimately sentenced to prison in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal.) In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Fairstein attacked the docudrama, writing, “Ms. DuVernay’s film attempts to portray me as an overzealous prosecutor and a bigot, the police as incompetent or worse, and the five suspects as innocent of all charges against them. None of this is true.”
Still, in light of the portrayal of her in the series, which came as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam, Fairstein’s professional life collapsed. Notwithstanding her string of best-sellers, her publisher and literary agent dropped her; all her speaking engagements were canceled; she was forced to resign from the boards of Safe Horizon, God’s Love We Deliver, and the Joyful Heart foundations as well as that of Vassar College, her alma mater. The Mystery Writers of America withdrew its “Grand Master” honor, and Glamour magazine retroactively canceled its 1993 designation of Fairstein as Woman of the Year. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat and a former prosecutor, returned Fairstein’s $1,000 donation to her 2020 presidential campaign.
Fairstein’s husband, Justin Feldman, had died in 2011, and she married Michael Goldberg, a partner in a private-equity firm, in 2014 on Martha’s Vineyard. Since the Netflix series, she’s moved to an island off the Florida coast. Her New York friends have seen little of her.
Then, Fairstein decided to fight back. In March 2020, she filed a 119-page libel suit against Netflix, DuVernay, and Locke, asserting that the defendants “depict Ms. Fairstein—using her true name—as a racist, unethical villain who is determined to jail innocent children of color at any cost.... The portrayal of Ms. Fairstein in the series was deliberately calculated to create one, clear and unmistakable villain to be targeted for hatred and vilification for what happened to The Five.”
Some of Fairstein’s complaints in the lawsuit seem relatively trivial—for example, about the conflation of the timeline of events—but some appear to be well founded. In the series, Fairstein instructs the cops who are conducting the interrogations, “The press is crawling all over this. No kid gloves here. These are not kids. They raped this woman. Our lady jogger deserves this.” There is no evidence that Fairstein ever said anything of the sort.
The series also creates an exchange among Morgenthau, Lederer, and Fairstein about the discovery of semen on the sock at the scene. Morgenthau says, “We have DNA, good. The match will nail this thing down.” Lederer responds, “How did the NYPD miss this?” To which Fairstein says, “Who cares? We have it now and the kicker is none of the defense is aware yet so we can test it right before the trial—surprise!”
Not only is this scene wholly invented, it suggests that Fairstein wanted to ambush the defense with the results of the DNA tests on the eve of trial—which would have been serious prosecutorial misconduct. In fact, the results of the DNA tests (which were exculpatory for the defendants) were turned over to the defense well in advance of the trial.
The legal rules governing semi-fictionalized portrayals of real events and people are unsettled—in 2019, Olivia de Havilland lost a similar case based on her depiction in the FX drama Feud: Bette and Joan. But Fairstein won an important early skirmish in the case when the judge declined to dismiss it. It’s now pending in federal district court in Manhattan. (Fairstein and her lawyers declined to comment.)
The Last Word
“Everyone knows my story,” Salaam said at the beginning of a candidates’ debate on New York One, the local all-news channel, “Thirty-four years ago, I was run over by the spiked wheels of justice. I was able to use my platform now to lift as we climb.” There is no incumbent running for the city-council seat, but Salaam has two opponents, both veteran elected officials in the area. With no mayor’s race this year, it’s a low-profile contest, to be decided by perhaps 10,000 voters. There are no polls, and the outcome is further clouded by the recent introduction of ranked-choice voting, which remains confusing to many New Yorkers.
Still, as Salaam walks the streets of Harlem, it’s clear that he’s still a celebrity, as he’s gone from calling himself one of the Central Park Five to one of the Exonerated Five. “Our case is a microcosm of all that’s wrong in the system,” he told me, adding an observation that probably applies to Fairstein as well as to the system as a whole. “True rehabilitation is owning up to the wrongs,” he said.
Jeffrey Toobin is a legal analyst and journalist whose latest book, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, is now available in bookstores