That, in turn, led to a vigorously supported petition to outright remove her books from shelves. And coinciding with the release of When They See Us, they led the charge for a boycott of Fairstein’s popular series of Alex Cooper crime novels (and more recent young-adult Devlin Quick mysteries), which she began publishing six years after the Five were convicted (she was with the DA’s office until 2002). Since Ken and Sarah Burns’s 2012 Central Park Five documentary was released, activists, particularly black activists, have increasingly called for social change on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Manhattan District Attorney Sex Crimes Chief Linda Fairstein (Played by Felicity Huffman)Ī lot can change over the course of seven years. However, she has expressed misgivings about the Five’s 2014 settlement, telling ABC News this year that she doubts Reyes acted alone and there is still more information about the crime that hasn’t come to light. In the late-1990s, she transitioned from her banking career to work as a motivational speaker addressing sexual-assault and brain-injury survivors. Most miraculously, Meili resumed running within months of starting physical therapy, and eventually began running competitively. She bears physical and cognitive scars from the ordeal, and still recalls nothing of the attack itself, or even the few hours leading up to it. Only in 2003, upon the release of her memoir, I Am the Central Park Jogger, did her name and face become synonymous to millions of Americans. Remarkably, Meili managed to hold on to her anonymity for 14 years following Reyes’s assault. Trisha Meili (Played by Alexandra Templer) To that end, and if only to promote awareness for the five’s continued activism and allow audiences to judge for themselves how innocence and guilt get rendered and rectified, here is an update on 11 people presented as crucial in DuVernay’s view. It also inevitably generates an interest in what has become of this saga’s most influential players, including not only the five unjustly incarcerated adolescents - who were also awarded a collective $41 million settlement by a federal judge in 2014 - but the handful of cops and attorneys who bent the law to their want, as well as Meili and her eventually confessed assailant, Matias Reyes. The series dares you not to pause and reflect on what you thought you knew - and what real-life antagonists like Donald Trump were sure they had pegged - about this case, black and minority youths, criminal justice, and American dreams.
But DuVernay is just as emphatic in affirming that NYPD detectives and New York County District Attorney’s Office prosecutors framed these boys and traumatized them into false confessions, triggering prison time of varying lengths and cruelty for each of them, embedding them in our collective psyche as the Central Park Five. The assault on Meili is, at a late point in the series, graphically reenacted, and it is made clear that she was victimized in an unthinkable way.
Writer-director Ava DuVernay’s sweeping, four-episode depiction of what led to the wrongful 1990 conviction (and eventual exoneration in 2002) of a handful of teenage boys from Harlem - Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana - in the violent rape and assault of 28-year-old New York banker Trisha Meili on Apnever flinches from its truth. When They See Us is, in many ways, brutal viewing. This story has been updated to reflect new developments since the show’s release.
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