how Yusef Salaam, wrongfully accused of rape, is on his way to becoming a New York City Councilman

A journey worthy of a fiction. At 49, Yusef Salaam could well win a seat on the New York City Council (United States) after winning the Democratic primary on Wednesday July 5 in the Harlem district. Against all expectations, this African-American won 63.8% of the vote against Inez Dickens (36.2%), a candidate yet supported by Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York. In this party bastion, he should logically get his job during the municipal elections to be held in November, according to the magazine Forbes.

Following Wednesday’s vote, Yusef Salaam thanked his voters for giving him a “Second chance”, reports CNN. An explicit reference to his past, he who is known to New Yorkers for having been one of the “Central Park Five”, these teenagers wrongly sentenced to several years in prison for the rape and lynching of a jogger in 1989 in the famous city park. They were finally cleared in 2002 and compensated in 2014. Their story was also adapted into a series on Netflix in May 2019.

“Prison is a permanent punishment”

It all begins one evening in April 1989. A 28-year-old white American jogger is found in a coma in Central Park. Analyzes show that she was beaten and raped. Very quickly, the affair moved the town and five teenagers – four African-Americans and a Hispanic – were arrested and forced by the police to confess to a crime they did not commit. “I heard them beating Korey Wise [un des adolescents] in the next room”Yusef Salaam will tell the Guardian in 2016. “They came to look at me and said to me: ‘You understand that you are next’. The fear really made me feel like I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this.”

This case comes in a particularly tense context in the American city: crack gangrene families and entire neighborhoods and the crime rate is increasing. That year, the number of homicides reached a record with nearly 2,000 recorded murders, recalls the Guardian. All this, a year of municipal elections, as was said New YorkMagazinein October 2002. Proof of the tensions shaking the “Big Apple”, in an advertisement published the day after the tragedy, the former American president, Donald Trump, then New York real estate magnate, asks that their the death penalty.

It will be necessary to wait until 2002, and the real confessions, this time, of the culprit, as well as forensic evidence attesting to his guilt, so that the “Five of Central Park” are exonerated. Although innocent, Yusef Salaam told the New York Times how this high-profile case stuck with him. He claims to have been fired from his first job in the construction industry after his employer discovered his identity. “Prison is a permanent punishment”he confides on a daily basis.

“If you survive prison, all doors to success will be closed to you.”

Yusef Salaam

in the “New York Times”

Years of confinement which he compares to a “removal”nearby New York Postwhile qualifying them as “gift”because he believes that they have enabled him to become aware of the functioning of American justice. “I got to see it for what it really was, a system that tried to make me believe I was my ancestors’ worst nightmare”he recalls.

Committed to justice reform

Thus, against all expectations, the idea of ​​a political career germinated, shortly after his arrest, he confided to the New York Times. Yusef Salaam, a practicing Muslim, explains in the daily that he could not help but see strange similarities between his personal story and that of his namesake, the Prophet Yusef, who, in the Koran, was thrown into a well , sold as a slave, falsely accused of rape and imprisoned.

“When I started to consider politics in general, I thought, ‘Where can I have the most impact? Where can I have the biggest impact?'”

Yusef Salaam

in the “New York Post”

After his job in construction, this father of ten children worked in the technical sector, then became a lecturer and writer. From then on, he committed himself to reforming the American judicial system, but also against the death penalty, mass incarceration and in favor of better conditions of detention. At 42, he ended up receiving from the hands of Barack Obama, then President of the United States, the “Lifetime Achievement Award”, the reward for the accomplishment of a lifetime, in 2016. Just before the latter left the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.