Rape, Race And The Press, Entangled In 'Central Park'
A change of pace for PBS long-form documentarian Ken Burns, The Central Park Five revisits New York City's recent past to tell the story of a pack of ruthless predators.
Two packs, actually: Gotham's prosecutors and police officers, and its reporters and columnists. Both groups went feral in 1989 against five innocent Harlem teenagers accused and then convicted in a rape and assault.
If the case doesn't sound familiar, perhaps this word will help: wilding. That's what police and journalists claimed was the kids' term for what they did the night of April 19, 1989. In this film, all five former defendants reflect on what happened — one of them, Antron McCray, is heard but not seen — and none utters that verb. It's just one of many words that were put into their mouths.
McCray and four other boys — Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond
Santana and Korey Wise — were in the north end of Central Park when a jogger was brutally ambushed. But there was no evidence that they attacked the victim, eventually identified as Trisha Meili, or even that they witnessed the crime. The five's clothing was unbloodied, and DNA found on Meili's body did not match any of theirs.
The lack of proof didn't seem to matter. Five years into the crack wars that roiled American cities in that era, New York wanted a quick resolution, not logic or ambiguity. "In those days, there were probably six murders a day," notes New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer, one of the film's expert witnesses.
The co-directors — Burns, daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon — fix the city's 1989 mood with snippets of contemporaneous hip-hop tracks and samples of hysterical press coverage. (It wasn't just the tabloids; national news anchors also sensationalized the story.) Guest stars include Donald Trump, Ed Koch and Al Sharpton, playing familiar roles.
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Kharey Wise as he looked in court when he was arraigned in the Central Park jogger rape case. The real rapist later confessed to his crime, exonerating the teens.