Former Prosecutor Settles Lawsuit Against Netflix Over Central Park Five Series

NEW YORK — Linda Fairstein, a former Manhattan prosecutor, and Netflix announced Tuesday that they had settled a defamation case she filed four years ago over her portrayal in Netflix’s miniseries about the five Black and Latino adolescents known as the Central Park Five, who were later exonerated.

Fairstein claimed that the 2019 four-part series “When They See Us” defamed her by presenting her as a “racist, unethical villain” and assigning acts, responsibilities, and perspectives that were not her own.

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Former Prosecutor Settles Lawsuit Against Netflix Over Central Park Five Series

The lawsuit was scheduled to go to trial later this month. Fairstein stated that “the decision to conclude this fight was not an easy one” and that she was confident she would have presented a “compelling case to the jury.” While Fairstein will not receive any monetary compensation as part of the settlement, Netflix has agreed to pay $1 million to the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals.

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Former Prosecutor Settles Lawsuit Against Netflix Over Central Park Five Series

Viewers of the series will also see a warning that reads, “While the motion picture is inspired by actual events and persons, certain characters, incidents, locations, dialogue, and names are fictionalized for the purposes of dramatization.”

“This is what this case was all about – not about ‘winning’ or any financial restitution, but about my reputation and that of my colleagues,” she stated. “It was about setting the historical record straight that the villainous caricature invented by the defendants and portrayed on screen was not me.”

Fairstein was Manhattan’s chief sex crimes prosecutor in 1989 when five youths were charged with viciously attacking a jogger in Central Park. The convictions were reversed in 2002 after Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, admitted to perpetrating the crime alone. DNA connected him to it.

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Former Prosecutor Settles Lawsuit Against Netflix Over Central Park Five Series

Fairstein, who became a best-selling crime author after leaving the Manhattan district attorney’s office, witnessed the boys’ interrogation but did not directly prosecute the case.

SOURCE – (AP)