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Kamala Harris wants Trump to watch Ava DuVernay’s Central Park Five documentary

June 20, 2019 at 2:51 p.m. EDT
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has some suggestions for President Trump's viewing. (Susan Walsh/AP)

President Trump’s TV viewing preferences famously run to “Fox & Friends” with an occasional hate-watch of CNN. But Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has another suggestion: The presidential candidate thinks Trump should add director Ava DuVernay’s documentary series “When They See Us” to his Netflix queue.

Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general of California, said “Trump and all Americans” should watch the four-part series, which explores the notorious trial and conviction (wrongful, it would turn out years later) of five men for the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989. “DuVernay’s retelling of the case is a masterpiece,” Harris wrote in a Wednesday op-ed for NBC News.

At the time of the crime, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads condemning “the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman” and calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. In the years since — long after DNA evidence and another man’s confession cleared the five young men — he has never apologized or acknowledged their exoneration.

Trump’s role in stoking the public outcry was documented in “When They See Us,” and the docuseries has revived interest in the case. This week, when asked whether he would take back his words, the president said: “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”

In her op-ed, Harris noted the wording he used was similar to what he said about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which a neo-Nazi protester killed one counterprotester and injured dozens of others. The phrase, Harris wrote, “should sound very familiar.”

Harris said DuVernay’s retelling of the case should serve as a history lesson — and a cautionary tale. “The series chronicles their unjust detainment, illegal interrogation and the dismissal of evidence that pointed to their innocence, further highlighting the flaws in a system that is supposed to be rooted in truth and justice,” she wrote.

The case — and particularly the experience of then-16-year-old Korey Wise, one of the wrongly convicted men — underscores the need for criminal justice reform for young people, Harris wrote. “We need to change our approach, by sentencing young people more leniently, ending the automatic transfer of children to adult prisons, and eliminating youth solitary confinement,” she wrote. “We must treat children like children.”

Trump’s both-siderism on the Central Park Five, as the men came to be called, was also called out by DuVernay herself. “It’s expected,” she said on Tuesday night, after a Hollywood screening by the Women in Entertainment and Writers Guild of America West, per the Los Angeles Times. “There’s nothing he says or does in relation to this case or the lives of black people or people of color that has any weight to it. It’s not our reality, there’s no truth to it.”