A prosecutor of the men known as the “Central Park Five” has claimed a new Netflix series about their rape conviction and exoneration defames her with false information about how the case unfolded and her role in it.
Linda Fairstein, who has faced intense backlash since the debut of When They See Us on 31 May , wrote in an op-ed published on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal that the dramatic series was “so full of distortions and falsehoods as to be an outright fabrication”.
Fairstein called the series “Netflix’s false story” and said the show “defames me”. But critics have noted that some assertions in her op-ed do not match official records about the case.
A Netflix spokeswoman said the company had no comment on Fairstein’s remarks.
The four-part series was written and directed by Ava DuVernay, the director of the movies A Wrinkle in Time and Selma, who responded to Fairstein’s op-ed on Twitter, writing: “Expected and typical. Onward.”
Fairstein, who is portrayed by the actor Felicity Huffman, said DuVernay had written “an utterly false narrative involving an evil mastermind (me) and the falsely accused (the five)”.
The five men – Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise – were 14 to 16 years old at the time of the 1989 rape and confessed after lengthy police interrogations. The victim was white and the defendants all black or Hispanic.
Each soon recanted, insisting they had admitted to the crime under coercion from police officers. But they all were convicted and served prison terms of six to 13 years.
A judge vacated their convictions in 2002 after another man confessed to the crime and DNA tests confirmed his guilt.
Fairstein led the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office from 1976 until 2002 and then became a bestselling crime novelist.
After criticism of her mounted on social media last week, Fairstein and her publisher Dutton said they had decided to “terminate their relationship”. Fairstein has also stepped down from boards of various not-for-profit groups, according to media reports.
Asked about Fairstein at a Netflix event on Sunday, DuVernay said: “It’s important that people be held accountable.”
But the director added: “It would be a tragedy if this story and the telling of it came down to one woman being punished for what she did, because it’s not about her. She is part of a system that is not broken, it was built to be this way. It was built to oppress.”
Some parts of Fairstein’s op-ed face scrutiny.
She said one of the “egregious falsehoods” was the presentation of the interrogations in the series, which implied the teens were held without food and without their parents and in some cases barred from using the bathroom.
“If that had been true, surely they would have brought those issues up and prevailed in pretrial hearings on the voluntariness of their statements, as well as in their lawsuit against the city,” she wrote. “They didn’t, because it never happened.”
But as the Washington Post noted, it was not a new claim. In a 2016 essay, Salaam wrote: “When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours. Under duress, we falsely confessed.”
Records also show the defendants did raise these concerns in a pretrial hearing, contrary to Fairstein’s claims, according to the New York Times.
Fairstein’s piece also references other crimes the Central Park Five allegedly committed in the park the night of the rape. But, as the Post noted, she ignored a later report from the district attorney’s office that concluded: “There is a probability that the new evidence, had it been available to the juries, would have resulted in verdicts more favorable to the defendants, not only on the charges arising from the attack on the female jogger but on the other charges as well.”
