Were the Central Park 5 as innocent as the miniseries portrays them to be?
No, and this is one of the miniseries' biggest failures. It portrays them as completely innocent boys who were more or less in the wrong place at the wrong time. The true story reveals that the Central Park 5 were part of a group of more than 30 teenagers from East Harlem, who entered Central Park and began committing assaults, robberies and attacks on walkers, joggers and bikers in the northernmost region of the park. The miniseries does a disservice to the victims by misrepresenting these attacks and failing to depict their severity, which is well documented.
.
.
.
The irony is that part of the new evidence that helped to exonerate the Central Park 5 with regard to the rape and assault of Trisha Meili, is a reconstruction of the timeline from that night, which instead of placing the five teens at the rape scene, placed them at muggings and beatings elsewhere in the park, either as participants or spectators (some questioned the new timeline's accuracy and its margin of error). "That was the issue," said Peter Rivera, Raymond Santana's lawyer in 1990. "But we didn't say, 'No, when the jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else.' That would have been self-defeating" (The New York Times).
The problem is that When They See Us plays everything to the extreme, from exaggerating Linda Fairstein's involvement (in real life, she wasn't even there the first day) and her role as the villain (she fictionally declares, "Every young black male who was in the park last night is a suspect in the rape of that woman!") to depicting the teens being threatened and beaten into coercion. Director Ava DuVernay based her miniseries on the stories told by the Central Park 5, which were used by the defense in their trial.