A federal judge on Friday agreed to recuse himself from overseeing the exonerated Central Park Five’s defamation lawsuit against President-elect Trump.
Shanin Specter, the Central Park Five’s lead attorney, disclosed earlier this week he has been friends with the judge since childhood and represented him and his wife in legal matters.
“Defendant respectfully submits that a reasonable person would question the Court’s impartiality in this matter, and therefore seeks recusal,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in a motion requesting that U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson remove himself from the trial.
Baylson, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, quickly agreed to the request after the plaintiffs indicated they did not oppose his recusal.
The suit will now be reassigned to another judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where the case was filed.
The Central Park Five sued Trump for defamation last month over his comments at September’s presidential debate about the group’s wrongful convictions.
The five Black and Hispanic teenagers were wrongfully found guilty of the 1989 rape and assault of a woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park. They spent years in prison before their convictions were overturned in 2002, once the true culprit confessed, something corroborated by DNA evidence.
The suit alleges Trump recklessly made false claims when he said the group “pled guilty” and they “killed a person ultimately” to the tens of millions watching the debate.
Trump and the five members have a long history. The then-real estate mogul paid for full-page advertisements in major New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty following the incident.
The defamation lawsuit remains in its early stages, but Trump’s campaign has described it as a frivolous case brought by “left-wing activists.”
Members of the Central Park Five opposed Trump during the campaign, including by addressing the Democratic National Convention. Yusef Salaam, a member of the group who now serves on the New York City Council, was also in the spin room supporting Vice President Harris following September’s debate.
