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Central Park Five prosecutor resigns from organizations amid backlash after Netflix series. Update: Former Prosecutor sues Ava over the series...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...izations-amid-backlash-after-netflix-n1013881

Linda Fairstein's role in the notorious case is under new scrutiny in the wake of director Ava DuVernay's Netflix miniseries, "When They See Us.”

Former Manhattan prosecutor Linda Fairstein resigned from Vassar College's board of trustees Tuesday amid a new wave of backlash over her role in the infamous Central Park Five case.

Fairstein's role in the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of five teenagers of color in 1990, after a white woman was attacked in Central Park, has come under new scrutiny after director Ava DuVernay released a Netflix miniseries about the case, "When They See Us."

The so-called Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were vindicated 13 years after the crime when a serial rapist confessed to the attack.

Fairstein — played by Felicity Huffman in "When They See Us" — ran the district attorney's sex crimes unit at the time of the case. The Netflix series prompted the #CancelLindaFairstein hashtag on social media and calls for her prior cases to be re-examined.

Students at Vassar began an online petition to remove Fairstein from the board and gained more than 13,000 signatures in two days, sparking the school to call an executive committee review to discuss the concerns.

Vassar College President Elizabeth Bradley announced that Fairstein resigned from the board because she "believed that her continuing as a Board member would be harmful to Vassar" due to the backlash.

"The events of the last few days have underscored how the history of racial and ethnic tensions in this country continue to deeply influence us today, and in ways that change over time," Bradley said.

Fairstein has also resigned from Safe Horizon, a nonprofit organization aiding victims of domestic abuse in New York City. Safe Horizon confirmed her resignation to NBC News on Tuesday.

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https://www.esquire.com/entertainme...rk-five-prosecutor-when-they-see-us-backlash/

Central Park Five Prosecutor Linda Fairstein Has Responded to When They See Us Backlash

She stepped down from her roles at various nonprofits and blamed filmmaker Ava DuVernay.


Three decades after helping send five innocent teenagers to prison, former prosecutor Linda Fairstein is facing a new round of backlash and criticism thanks to the Netflix series When They See Us, which tells the story of Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise. The series, by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, reexamines the accusations, false confessions, and aftermath of the case against the boys, who were teenagers when they were accused of raping a jogger, and became known in the media as the Central Park Five.

Fairstein, who is played by Felicity Huffman, is portrayed in the show as immediately convinced of the boys' guilt, despite any physical evidence linking them to the scene and descriptions in their confessions that didn't match the crime scene. After Matais Reyes, a serial rapist, confessed to the attack in 2002, and DNA confirmed his account, the men were exonerated and Fairstein's role in the investigations faced some criticism. But she was able to pursue a successful career as a novelist and sit on nonprofit boards.

Now, she has stepped down from many of those roles, including her seat on the board at Safe Horizon, a nonprofit supporting victims of domestic violence, Esquire has confirmed.

“I do not want to become a lightning rod to inflict damage on this organization, because of those now attacking my record of fighting for social justice for more than 45 years,” Fairstein told the New York Post. She added that she was "sorry that the staff [of Safe Horizon], through their CEO Ariel Zwang, declined to meet with me to learn the truths behind the inflammatory and false narrative."


She sent similar letters stepping down from roles on the boards of God’s Love We Deliver, the Joyful Heart Foundation, and her alma mater, Vassar College, she told The Post.

"I am told that Ms. Fairstein felt that, given the recent widespread debate over her role in the Central Park case, she believed that her continuing as a board member would be harmful to Vassar," Elizabeth H. Bradley, the president of Vassar College, confirmed in a statement.

When When They See Us premiered over the weekend, #CancelLindaFairstein began trending on Twitter and a change.org petition called for publishers and booksellers to stop supporting the prosecutor-turned-novelist. Salaam and Santana have supported the boycott. "The truth comes out," Santana told TMZ about the backlash against Fairstein. "Even if it's 30 years later, she has to pay for her crime."

Before stepping down from her various roles on boards, Fairstein criticized the Netflix show, and particularly filmmaker DuVernay.

"It's a basket of lies," she told The Daily Beast. She called the show “a totally and completely untrue picture of events and my participation,” including “putting words in my mouth that I never said in Oliver Stone fashion.”

DuVernay earlier told The Daily Beast that she'd reached out to Fairstein while making the series, but that Fairstein had demanded script approval. Fairstein, however, said her lawyer sent the filmmaker a letter detailing the public record of the case but that she never got a response. She accused DuVernay of orchestrating the public campaign against her.

“She’s behind it,” Fairstein told The Daily Beast. “Her lies are behind it all.”


Netflix didn't respond to a request to comment. Fairstein has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
 
Oh they got AT her. She had to shut down all her social media shit.

They need to crush Candice Owens once and for all next....this bih on Twitter coon-based attention whoring to the highest degree.

 
i dont think anyone expected the system to actually do anything

too much like shooting themselves in the foot to admit wrongdoing

this movement will still effect her life tho....shits about to get tight for her, as it should
 
https://www.tmz.com/2019/06/05/lind...hers-mum-stand-by-central-park-five-backlash/

LINDA FAIRSTEINHER PUBLISHERS AREN'T BOOKING IT... Despite CP5 Backlash


The saying "silence speaks volumes" couldn't be more true for Linda Fairstein and her book publishers, who've signaled where they stand on the uproar against her ... by remaining silent and doing nothing.

Despite a massive amount of backlash and scrutiny that's forced the D.A.'s former lead investigator on the Central Park Five case to resign from boards of directors -- there have been no consequences for her in the publishing world, where she's made a killing.

TMZ has reached out to multiple people at both Penguin Random House and its subsidiary, Dutton -- two publishing companies that have peddled her 14 novels -- but we haven't heard a peep.

An online push to boycott her publishers and distributors erupted when the Netflix series, "When They See Us" -- about the CP5 case -- premiered last Friday.

We've reached out to 6 different people at both PRH and Dutton, including reps from Linda's literary agency, ICM Partners -- but still ... radio silence.

It's interesting ... Fairstein resigned from her leadership positions at nonprofit Safe Horizon as well as from Vassar College after immense outrage over her role in wrongfully prosecuting and securing convictions against the then-teenagers ... which is captured in Netflix's new "When They See Us."

She was even publicly rebuked by Glamour Magazine, which said it was a mistake to give her the Woman of the Year Award in '93 ... adding they wouldn't do it again.
 
https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-linda-fairstein-boycott-20190606-story.html

Central Park Five film sparks call to boycott ex-prosecutor Linda Fairstein's books

Critics of former New York City prosecutor Linda Fairstein are calling for a boycott of the attorney's mystery novels after a new Netflix drama series reignited controversy about her prosecution of the Central Park Five in 1990.

CNN reports that a petition to urge booksellers and Fairstein's publishers to drop her books has gained traction on the website Change.org.

"Linda Fairstein led a witch hunt against five teenage boys even though the physical evidence didn’t support her theory she raged on with one goal in mind & that was to get a conviction at any expense even the lives of teenage boys,"reads the petition, written by Ryan Swink. "I am starting a petition to ask ALL retailers & book publishers to stop selling Linda Fairstein books or any product that has ties to her."

Fairstein was the head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney's office, and led the prosecution of five New York teenagers who were charged with the brutal rape and beating of Trisha Meili, a woman who was attacked while jogging in Central Park. Four of the arrested teens were African American and one was Latino.

Four of the five youths confessed to the crime, but retracted their confessions shortly thereafter, saying they were coerced. All five were found guilty but their convictions were vacated in 2002 after an imprisoned rapist and murderer admitted he was the one who attacked Meili.

The case has always been controversial, but it returned to the headlines recently after the debut of "When They See Us," a miniseries based on the trial written and directed by Ava DuVernay and featuring actress Felicity Huffman as Fairstein.

After the trial, Fairstein became a novelist, writing over 20 crime novels, most of which feature the character Alexandra Cooper, a New York prosecutor.

While "When They See Us" has returned the case to the national spotlight, Fairstein has been criticized for years by supporters of the Central Park Five who maintain that the prosecutor ignored the lack of any physical evidence tying the teenagers to the assault, and relied on false and coerced confessions to prosecute the youths.

In November, the Mystery Writers of America announced it was withdrawing its planned Grand Master award for Fairstein, following criticism from authors like Attica Locke, the mystery novelist, who objected to the honor on Twitter.

"I am begging you to reconsider having Linda Fairstein serve as a Grand Master in next year’s awards ceremony. She is almost singlehandedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five," Locke wrote. "Just because she has a flourishing publishing career does not mean we should ignore her past — or her continued unwillingness to accept responsibility for ruining five innocent men’s lives."

Supporters of the boycott of Fairstein's books took to Twitter to voice their opinions of the ex-prosecutor, using the hashtag #CancelLindaFairstein
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/arts/television/linda-fairstein-when-they-see-us.html

Linda Fairstein, Once Cheered, Faces Storm After ‘When They See Us’

A Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case has led to intense criticism of the famous prosecutor-turned-novelist who oversaw the investigation.


For much of her life, Linda Fairstein was widely viewed as a law enforcement hero.

As one of the first leaders of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex crimes unit, later the inspiration for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” she became one of the best known prosecutors in the country. She went on to a successful career as a crime novelist and celebrity former prosecutor, appearing on high-profile panels and boards.

But since last Friday and the premiere of “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case, Ms. Fairstein has become synonymous with something else: The story of how the justice system wrongly sent five black and Latino teenagers to prison for a horrific rape.

Ms. Fairstein ran the sex crimes division when, in 1989, a white woman jogging in Central Park was viciously raped, beaten, and left for dead. In the four-part series, Ms. Fairstein’s character is shown as the driving force in the case, urging on a prosecutor who had doubts and finding ways to explain away facts that pointed to the teens’ innocence.

In the last few days, online petitions and a hashtag, #CancelLindaFairstein, have called for a boycott of her books and her removal from prominent board positions. After a barrage of criticism directed at her on Twitter, she took her own account down. And she resigned this week from the boards of several organizations including Safe Horizon and the Joyful Heart Foundation, which aid victims of sexual violence, and Vassar College, her alma mater.

Back in 1993, Glamour named her one of its women of the year. But on Tuesday, it published a letter from the editor saying, “Unequivocally, Glamour would not bestow this honor on her today.”

Ms. Fairstein’s conduct during the case has been a matter of intensedebate and criticism since a man named Matias Reyes surfaced in 2002 to confess that he committed the crime. Ms. Fairstein continued to write books and serve on important boards even after the convictions were overturned, as the case faded into memory for many.

But the Netflix series has placed the prosecution back on center stage, where the power of television’s narrative focus, the lightning speed of online reaction and the villainous characterization of Ms. Fairstein have made her a target of public outrage.

The series is a dramatized account based on the experiences of the “Central Park Five” — Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam. They went to prison for several years before being cleared, and in 2014 the de Blasio administration settled their lawsuit against the city for $41 million, while admitting no wrongdoing on the part of investigators.

Mr. Reyes’s confession exposed the deep flaws in the way Ms. Fairstein’s unit had handled the case. No forensic evidence tied the teenagers to the crime and prosecutors relied on contradictory confessions that the teenagers said were coerced. The DNA evidence pointed to another perpetrator — unknown at the time, and who turned out to be Mr. Reyes — but investigators never pursued other lines of inquiry, heedlessly assuming they were right.

But was the real-life Ms. Fairstein as scheming as the TV version? (She is played by Felicity Huffman, who was arrested in the college admissions scandal after filming was complete.) The script took liberties with dialogue and timing of events, a use of artistic license that Ms. Fairstein’s defenders describe as unfair, and her detractors embrace as in broad keeping with the injustice that ensued.

Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer who represented four of the five men in their lawsuit, said while “we don’t know for sure what she was saying to the prosecutors or to the detectives,” her depiction in the series “captures the essence of who she was.”

But Ms. Fairstein, 72, called it “grossly and maliciously inaccurate,” as she put it in her resignation letters to several boards.

“The truth about my participation can be proved in the pages of public records and case documents,” she said in her letter to the chairman of Vassar’s board. “But that has not been apparent to those embracing the mob mentality that now dominates social media, any more than it was considered by the rashly irresponsible filmmaker.”

Ms. DuVernay was unavailable for comment, a representative said on Wednesday.

Until the convictions were overturned, Ms. Fairstein had been widely respected as a law enforcement pioneer. The Manhattan sex crimes unit was the first of its kind in the country, and Ms. Fairstein was made its chief in 1976, two years after its creation.

She ran that department for 25 years, and of the thousands of investigations she oversaw, including the Robert Chambers “preppy killer” case, which ended with his guilty plea for manslaughter, the Central Park case was perhaps the most high profile.

In 2002, a report by the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that the convictions against the five should be vacated, and that there had been significant problems with the prosecution’s case.

The report said statements by the five defendants “differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime — who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place.” None of them accurately described where the jogger was attacked.

A dueling report, commissioned by the New York Police Department, found that no misconduct occurred during the investigation and said it was “more likely than not that the defendants participated in an attack upon the jogger.” One of the authors of the report, Stephen L. Hammerman, was the top legal adviser for the police department at the time.

Daniel R. Alonso, who was a colleague of Ms. Fairstein’s at the district attorney’s office, said that while “it’s a terrible, terrible thing when someone gets wrongfully convicted,” he did not believe the case should overshadow Ms. Fairstein’s accomplishments.

“I think it’s terrible to ‘cancel’ someone’s entire career over one matter,” he said, citing Ms. Fairstein’s history of prosecuting rapists and lobbying for policies that benefit victims of sexual crimes.

The facts now forcing Ms. Fairstein into exile have been known for nearly two decades, and she has faced some backlash before. Last year, the Mystery Writers of America said that because of her role in the Central Park case, it would not present her with an award it had already announced was hers. (In 2013, a petition circulated online calling on Columbia University’s law school to fire Elizabeth Lederer, the lead prosecutor in the case, who was an adjunct faculty member. She remains a lecturer there today.)

But the level of outrage seen in recent days has been different.

In Ms. DuVernay’s emotional and intimate series, Ms. Fairstein comes off as the primary villain, with numerous lines depicting her as bent on railroading the young men.

“Every young black male who was in the park last night is a suspect in the rape of that woman,” Ms. Fairstein’s character says early on.

“So, there must have been another attacker,” she says to Ms. Lederer in the second episode. “One must have gotten away.”

“You honestly believe that?” a dubious Ms. Lederer asks.

“I do if it helps a jury believe what we know is true,” Ms. Fairstein responds.

Among other liberties taken by the series was in its depiction of the beginning of the investigation.
 
The police and prosecutors are portrayed as immediately aware of discrepancies between the teens’ confessions and the timing of the rape. But in reality the movements of the jogger, Trisha Meili, and the timing of her attack were not established until much later.

In a statement, a lawyer for Ms. Fairstein, Andrew T. Miltenberg, accused Netflix and Ms. DuVernay of “misrepresenting the facts in an inflammatory and inaccurate manner” and threatened to take legal action. (John C.P. Goldberg, a Harvard law professor and expert on defamation law, said that Ms. Fairstein’s position as a public figure would make it difficult for her to win a defamation suit.)

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ms. DuVernay said she reached out to Ms. Fairstein before she wrote the script. She said she asked if they could have a conversation so Ms. DuVernay would have Ms. Fairstein’s perspective in her head. According to Ms. DuVernay, Ms. Fairstein said she would sit down only if certain conditions were met, including approval over the script. Ms. DuVernay said no, and the conversation didn’t happen.

Ms. Fairstein’s lawyer disputed that account, saying that she “only requested that Ms. DuVernay take into account public records, transcripts, and written testimonies when writing her script about the Central Park Five.”

Ms. Fairstein is also, in a way, still fighting with the five. Long after her office moved to erase their convictions, and essentially without any evidence beyond their problematic confessions, she and others involved in the investigation have maintained that the men probably played some role in the rape, which they deny.

Whether the reaction to her depiction in “When They See Us” will affect her writing career remains to be seen. Her success as a novelist is even addressed in the final episode.

Ms. Fairstein meets with Nancy Ryan, who wrote the district attorney’s 2002 report. Ms. Ryan pulls out several of Ms. Fairstein’s books and places them on the table in front of her.

“While you were writing crime novels,” Ms. Ryan says, “Kevin, Antron, Yusef, Raymond and Korey were serving time for crimes they didn’t commit.”
 
We already know how this is gunna play out. They admit no wrong doing, get no jail time & all we can do is fuck up some of their money for as long as we remember.
 
https://www.thewrap.com/welcome/401...stein-didnt-want-producers-to-talk-to-5-men~/

Central Park 5 Prosecutor Didn’t Want ‘When They See Us’ Producers to Talk to Exonerated Men

Since Ava DuVernay’s latest dive into the social justice system, “When They See Us,” dropped on Netflix on May 31, the criticism and backlash toward former New York prosecutor Linda Fairstein has been swift and strong.

Fairstein was painted as the villain in DuVernay’s four-episode limited series, and she has since been the subject of a #CancelLindaFairstein hashtag online.

“We reached out to her and there were many email exchanges with her. We asked to meet to get her perspective,” said producer and Tribeca Enterprises CEO Jane Rosenthal during a panel at the 2019 Produced By conference in Burbank on Sunday. “She insisted that we look at the transcript of the case, which obviously was part of our research. She also had been under a gag order during the [Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon] doc and couldn’t speak, but she stated to us that she was getting many offers and that perhaps she wanted to talk to us because she had other offers.

“She was also concerned that we were talking to the five men,” Rosenthal continued. “So her point of view was clearly that she didn’t want us talking to the five men if we were talking to her.”
 
https://nypost.com/2019/06/05/canceling-a-heroine-the-mobbing-of-linda-fairstein/

Canceling’ a heroine: the
mobbing of Linda Fairstein

By Bethany Mandel


It’s curious to see so-called feminists work to “cancel” a woman who has spent decades championing women and trying rapists, but this week they did just that — setting their sights on former prosecutor and victims rights advocate Linda Fairstein.

“Canceling” people is a digital-age, organized boycott aimed at denying someone a livelihood after they supposedly commit a sin. To that end, the mob forced Fairstein to resign her position at Safe Horizon, the country’s largest victim services organization, and at other groups. They also sought boycotts of her mystery books, and she has been forced to delete her social media accounts to shield herself from the firestorm.

Fairstein was the supervising prosecutor in the Central Park Five case, in which a jogger was raped, rocking the city in 1989. Now, a new Netflix documentary miniseries, “When They See Us,” depicts Fairstein as racially profiling and coercing confessions from the Hispanic and black teenagers she prosecuted. The teens wound up serving between six and 13 years before another man, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime.

Certainly enough evidence to justify the charges. For starters, there were confessions from the men, including such statements as: “We got her on the ground. Everybody started hitting her and stuff . . . Then we got, each — I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.”

Despite the claims of the Netflix flick, judgments about the validity of those confessions are far from universally held. Michael Armstrong, who served on a panel re-investigating the case, noted in The Wall Street Journal in 2014 (when the city settled a wrongful-conviction lawsuit by agreeing to a $40 million payout to the five defendants) that there’s no evidence the confessions were coerced.

Fairstein herself stated unequivocally that “the confessions were not coerced,” adding that “there were weeks of a [pretrial] Huntley hearing in which the voluntariness of the statements was explored, and in a 160-page opinion by Judge [Thomas] Galligan, all were ruled admissible.”

But in the age of “canceling,” there are good guys and bad, and Fairstein is deemed one of the latter. Jezebel shrugs off the firestorm against Fairstein as “a very small comeuppance in exchange for five young men’s decades of false imprisonment.” Pajiba, a feminist website, uses the same term, “comeuppance,” to describe results achieved by the online attack mob.

Truth is, far too many sexual predators get away with their crimes, and Fairstein spent her life fighting against that. Fairstein headed up the first-of-its-kind sex crimes unit in Manhattan for 26 years, a unit that inspired “Law & Order SVU.”

She was a pioneer woman in courts that were male-dominated and in a society and legal system that did little to achieve justice for victims of sexual crimes. She won numerous awards for her work.

Moreover, there’s no crisis of false convictions. Surely a dramatized Netflix show doesn’t have the heft to override hard facts and drive personal attacks, especially against people doing their jobs faithfully.

In a 2002 New York magazine piece on the trial, Chris Smith noted that Fairstein fought to get the Central Park jogger case because “the jogger was definitely the victim of a sex crime, and if she lived [she] would need a compassionate prosecutor.”

Indeed, in nearly every postmortem about the case, aside from the Netflix take, Fairstein consistently comes off as a passionate advocate for women and victims, and her decades of work with Safe Horizon is evidence of that passion.

Feminists cheering Fairstein’s “cancellation,” while at the same time lamenting the sorry state of the criminal justice system for sexual assault victims, should understand how their activism against her will hurt future victims. There are few women who fill the role Fairstein did, or who can step in with the institutional knowledge and power to make an impact in the criminal justice system on behalf of victims as she did.

This isn’t just about Fairstein disappearing from her role as a victims advocate. It’s about seeing that justice is done, that prosecutors — indeed, people in all walks of life — won’t recoil at doing their job for fear of the mob.



d4f.gif
 
Oh they got AT her. She had to shut down all her social media shit.

They need to crush Candice Owens once and for all next....this bih on Twitter coon-based attention whoring to the highest degree.


What does them not being innocent kids have to do with being wrongly convicted of a crime they didnt commit. Oh it's ok they went to jail anyway cause they werent Angel's. That's pure unadulterated cooning..why do yall know about this bitch?
 
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