Central Park Five prosecutor takes heat over new Netflix series, calls it ‘basket of lies’
Linda Fairstein is feeling the heat from prize-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, which portrays the retired New York sex-crimes prosecutor as a purveyor of injustice who racially profiled and railroaded the so-called Central Park Five three decades ago.
Despite the fact that DNA from semen collected during the Central Park Five investigation never connected any of the teens to the savage 1989 rape of a white female jogger—and was ultimately matched to a convicted serial rapist and murderer who confessed to the attack in 2002—Fairstein has continued to defend the prosecution’s judgment that the black teens were guilty.
Fairstein, who has continued to defend her handling of the case and even claimed—in the same New York Law Journal essay—that the false confessions of the five teenagers were not coerced, has even been the target of demands that she herself be charged with prosecutorial misconduct. In 2002, after the five had already served more than a decade behind bars, convicted serial rapist Matias Reyes, who was already serving a life sentence for other crimes but was never considered a suspect in the Central Park attack, confessed to raping jogger Trisha Meili—which was quickly confirmed by the DNA evidence from semen discovered during the investigation.
In a phone interview with The Daily Beast, Fairstein attacked both the Netflix miniseries and DuVernay, who has claimed that Fairstein wanted to control how she was portrayed in the miniseries. The series also presents a fundamental misrepresentation of how the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office interacts with police investigators, Fairstein said.
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