Did Donald Trump take out newspaper ads about the Central Park Five and what did they say?
Executive summary
Donald J. Trump did take out full‑page newspaper advertisements in New York City in 1989 that called for reinstating the death penalty in response to the brutal Central Park attack, and those ads explicitly urged harsh punishments for violent offenders — language that critics later summarized as demanding execution for those responsible for the crime [1] [2] [3]. The ads ran in several major papers on May 1, 1989, and have been repeatedly cited and reproduced in reporting, archives and fact‑checks as central evidence of Trump’s public stance during the case that ultimately produced the Central Park Five’s wrongful convictions and later exonerations [4] [5] [6].
1. The ads existed, where they ran, and who paid for them
Contemporaneous reporting and archival records show Trump paid for full‑page newspaper ads placed on May 1, 1989, in multiple New York publications including The New York Times, the New York Daily News, New York Post and Newsday, an expenditure widely reported as costing about $85,000 at the time [4] [3] [5]. The document copies of the ads are preserved in news archives and DocumentCloud, and multiple major outlets — NPR, BBC, Time and The Guardian among them — recount that Trump financed and placed those inserts shortly after the April 19 attack [2] [7] [4] [8].
2. What the ads actually said — the message and the wording
The text of the ads called for reinstating capital punishment in New York State and demanded “respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law,” and included language that critics have summarized as urging execution “when they kill” — phrasing that made the ad widely understood as advocating death for those who commit murder [6] [5] [9]. Fact‑checking and media reconstructions reproduce key lines from the ad and confirm that its central thrust was a public push to “bring back the death penalty” as a response to the attack [6] [2].
3. How the ads were received then and later — impact and controversy
At the time the ads were published they generated substantial public feedback and controversy; Trump later told Larry King he had received thousands of letters supporting the stance and framed the reaction as proof of community demand for law and order [10]. Over decades the ads became touchstones in assessments of Trump’s racial politics and role in the Central Park Five saga: survivors and the wrongly convicted have said the ads amounted to a “bounty” or a call for their deaths, and civil‑rights commentators point to the inserts as evidence of racially charged rhetoric that inflamed tensions [11] [12] [8].
4. What the ads mean today — context of exoneration and Trump’s subsequent statements
The five teenagers later known as the Central Park Five were exonerated in 2002 after another man confessed and DNA evidence corroborated that confession; modern reporting frames the 1989 ads against that backdrop and as part of a longer pattern of Trump’s public reactions to criminal cases [7] [2]. Trump has not consistently disavowed the 1989 ads; he has at times stood by his original rhetoric and has made claims about the men’s guilt in later public remarks and legal disputes, which has prompted renewed scrutiny and lawsuits from the exonerated men [7] [2].
5. Limits of the public record and competing interpretations
Primary sources — the ad facsimiles archived by news outlets and DocumentCloud — establish the ads and their calls for reinstating the death penalty, but interpretation of tone and intent varies: supporters frame the ads as a law‑and‑order policy stance, while critics and the wrongly convicted view them as an incitement to violence against Black and Latino youths; reporting and fact‑checks corroborate the ad text but cannot read Trump’s private motives beyond his contemporaneous statements and later defenses [1] [10] [6]. Where the public record is silent about internal intent, reporting sticks to what the ads said and to the documented reactions and outcomes that followed [3] [4].