A group of men who were exonerated for the rape and assault of a woman in Central Park in 1989 have sued Donald Trump for continuing to suggest that they are guilty, including at the presidential debate in Philadelphia last month.

The Central Park Five alleged in a federal court defamation lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that Trump falsely claimed during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris that the men pleaded guilty after being charged in the case as teenagers, and that they had killed someone. The defendants in fact were cleared of wrongdoing. And the victim of the infamous attack sustained life-threatening injuries but survived.

At the time of the crime, Trump took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for a return of the death penalty in New York, a move widely seen as a reaction to the attack on the jogger, directed at those who had committed the assault.

After a re-investigation of the case and after another suspect’s DNA confirmed his involvement, the defendants, who were Black and Latino, were cleared of wrongdoing. By then, they had served years in prison.

As he seeks a second term in the White House as the Republican nominee in the Nov. 5 election, Trump has continued to make public statements implying guilt on the part of the Central Park Five, suggesting that they were responsible for some crimes that occurred in the park — including another brutal assault.

Trump’s comments at the debate reached an enormous television audience and were further amplified in widespread news coverage.

The wrongly accused men “suffered harm, including severe emotional distress and reputational damage, as a direct result of Defendant Trump’s false and defamatory statements at the [debate], as well as his continuing pattern of extreme and outrageous conduct,” their lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.

Trump lost two defamation lawsuits over the past two years that were brought against him by author E. Jean Carroll, who also successfully sued him for a long-ago sexual assault.

Carroll, who won verdicts totaling about $90 million, said Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s. He adamantly denied it and repeatedly called her a liar and insulted her after her claim was made public.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement Monday that the lawsuit was an attempt to interrupt the election, a refrain Trump and his supporters have used in response to other civil and criminal cases against him.

“This is just another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign,” Cheung wrote in the statement.

New York City reached a settlement with the Central Park Five for $41 million to compensate them for what was determined to be their wrongful prosecution and imprisonment.

One member of the group, Yusef Salaam, is now a member of the New York City Council representing sections of Harlem.

The new lawsuit stems from Trump’s comments at the debate, which was watched by 67 million people on Sept. 10, according to court papers.

In a portion of the debate focused on race and politics, Harris, the Democratic nominee, said she wanted to remind voters that Trump had taken out the newspaper ad suggesting the perpetrators of the jogger attack should face the death penalty.

“We have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said.

Trump issued a muddled response, first suggesting that the teens pleaded guilty before he seemingly backtracked.

“They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” Trump said. “And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”

The lawsuit also lays out an encounter between Trump and Salaam after the debate. Salaam introduced himself to Trump as attendees asked Trump if he would apologize to the five men for his comments.

“Ah, you’re on my side then,” Trump said to Salaam, who corrected the former president, saying he was not a supporter. Trump then waved and walked away.

“Plaintiff Salaam was attempting to politely dialogue with Defendant Trump about the false and defamatory statements that Defendant Trump had made about Plaintiffs less than an hour earlier, but Defendant Trump refused to engage with him in dialogue,” the lawsuit says.

To prove defamation, the group will have to show that Trump’s public comments were false and caused them harm. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages for reputation harm, emotional distress and out-of-pocket expenses as well as punitive damages to prevent Trump from continuing to repeat his claims about them.

SWANNANOA, N.C. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump declined to condemn violent threats to Federal Emergency Management Agency workers providing relief to Americans impacted by Hurricane Helene, instead criticizing the government’s storm response using false allegations.

Asked during a news conference here about whether the former president is harming the recovery effort after a man was arrested for threatening federal relief workers this month, Trump responded by repeating falsehoods, including those the suspect said motivated him. Trump did not offer any concern for the workers’ safety or a denunciation of violence.

MALVERN, Pa. — Vice President Kamala Harris joined forces with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney here Monday to denounce GOP nominee Donald Trump as unfit for office, part of the Harris campaign’s last-ditch effort to win over moderate Republicans and independent voters.

The unlikely pair was scheduled to appear later in Michigan and Wisconsin, holding onstage conversations in an effort to persuade undecided voters, especially Republicans with misgivings about Trump, to cast their ballot for Harris. With the occasional feel of a buddy movie, the two women — in similar pantsuits, Harris in green and Cheney in blue — assailed Trump as Harris heaped praise on Cheney for her support.

“I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the Constitution,” Cheney said. “And you have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the Constitution — who will be faithful — and Donald Trump.”

Cheney, a staunch conservative who served as the third-ranking House Republican until 2021, called endorsing Harris “not at all a difficult choice.” She warned about the risk posed by Trump’s relationships with dictators, saying that she has seen “how quickly democracies can unravel.”

Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, emerged as one of the most vocal GOP critics of Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, and later went on to lose her seat in a Republican primary because of that criticism. She endorsed Harris in September and appeared at her first campaign event with the vice president this month in Wisconsin.

Cheney and her father are perhaps the most prominent Republicans to endorse Harris, the result of an intensive effort by the Harris campaign to recruit high-profile conservatives to back the Democratic nominee. Given the closeness of the election across all the battleground states, Harris’s advisers believe that attracting even a sliver of disaffected Republicans could prove to be pivotal.

On Monday, Susan Ford Bales, the daughter of former president Gerald Ford, announced that she was endorsing Harris.

At the Pennsylvania event, Cheney frequently noted that she has vast disagreements with Harris on a range of policy issues. But she said that Harris, unlike Trump, “will always do what she believes is right for this country.”

She also criticized Trump’s character more broadly.

“We’re going to reject the kind of vile vitriol that we’ve seen from Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “We’re going to reject the misogyny that we’ve seen from Donald Trump. … We have the chance to remind people that we are a good country. We are good and honorable people.”

In advance of Monday’s events, Trump posted on Truth Social to deride Cheney as a “war hawk.” The former president has been seeking to appeal to Arab American voters in Michigan.

“Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed [President George W.] Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind,” Trump wrote.

Harris is pushing hard to broaden her appeal to centrist and Republican-leaning voters. She has distanced herself from some of the liberal policy positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, and on Monday she reiterated her promise to appoint a Republican to her cabinet if she wins.

“We need a healthy two-party system,” Harris said. “We need to be able to have these pretty intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact.”

“Imagine!” Cheney, seated next to Harris, chimed in.

As the crowd cheered, Harris said, “Wow, can you believe that’s an applause line?”

Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W.Va.), questioned the strategy of deploying Cheney, arguing that it does little to address voters’ main concern, which is the economy.

“Not sure what turnout model they are looking at, but there is no Cheney bloc of voters that I am aware of that will win this election for Harris,” Kofinis said. ‘Even worse, the more events they do with her, the more they remind Democrats, progressives and voters in general that her father was Dick Cheney and the enduring damage he did to this nation.” Many progressives see Dick Cheney as an architect of the Iraq War, which they regard as an enormous foreign policy blunder.

Even as she faces an electorate yearning for change, Harris has shied away from identifying clear differences with President Joe Biden. When asked by the moderator to outline her agenda, Harris said: “Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration. I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences.”

But she did not articulate specific differences. Rather, Harris went on to explain her vision for an “opportunity economy” and her plan to address the nation’s housing shortage. Last week, Harris told NBC News that it was not part of the American tradition for vice presidents to criticize the president they serve.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pennsylvania), who represents Chester County after flipping the seat in 2018, said she had asked the Harris campaign for the vice president and Cheney to appear in this swing district.

“This is absolutely where the rubber meets the road, literally where the red meets the blue,” she said.

She added, “It’s pretty grave when somebody as serious as [Cheney] and her father are coming out with this really important message to the American people, to Republicans and independents specifically, that this is a very different election.”

Several people in the audience suggested that Harris was having at least modest success in attracting former GOP voters. Mary Jean Moroz, who said she was a registered Republican until the Jan. 6 attack, gushed about watching Harris and Cheney onstage together. She voted for Harris by mail last week.

“It was nice to hear two women from two different parties come together with great ideas,” said Moroz, 60. “It’s very reassuring to see someone from my former party be so supportive of a Democrat.”

Glenn Gerhard, a registered Republican who voted for the libertarian candidate in the last two presidential elections, said he mailed in his ballot for Harris last week, marking his first time voting for a Democratic presidential nominee.

“It’s my first time voting for Democrat, and I may never again,” he said. “Hopefully I will never again.”

Gerhard, a 63-year-old professor at Temple University, said Trump “was unacceptable for any kind of office.” He called the former president one of the “crudest, lewdest and disgusting individuals.”

“I want my party back,” Gerhard said. “We have to defeat Trump in as loud and dramatic way as possible and then start getting back to the roots of the party.”

Amy Wang contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump’s years-long effort to restrict mail balloting and early voting has skidded into reverse in North Carolina, with the Republican presidential nominee demanding the kind of easier voting access that he labeled fraudulent when Democrats pushed similar measures during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Trump’s about-face comes after Hurricane Helene left dozens dead and thousands temporarily pushed from their communities after widespread destruction of homes, roads and water supplies when the storm deluged the western part of the state in late September.

The 25 hardest-hit counties are almost all deeply conservative, places where Trump must rack up big margins to offset more liberal urban centers, such as Charlotte and Raleigh, that are likely to net voting gains for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Several Trump advisers said his campaign is worried that hundreds of thousands more Trump voters than Harris voters have been affected by the storm in a critical battleground that the former president must win if he is to regain the White House. Trump won North Carolina by just over a percentage point in 2020.

Since the storm hit, the campaign has advocated changes to voting policy and procedures that mirror the type of pandemic-related accommodations that came under attack from Trump and his allies four years ago.

The changes include letting voters affected by the storm drop their mail ballot at any county or state election office in North Carolina; allowing counties to open new polling locations and modify their early-voting hours to maximize voter participation; waive county residency requirements for poll workers and observers; and allow temporary structures to be used in place of damaged or destroyed polling locations.

“The county boards in North Carolina need to act quickly to make adjustments,” said Trump political director James Blair. “They cannot disenfranchise voters, and we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.”

But the campaign’s rhetoric has puzzled state election officials, who had already authorized counties to move forward with most of the provisions Trump’s team demanded before the campaign circulated them.

The GOP-controlled state legislature also unanimously enacted the same emergency changes to leave no doubt as to their legality. Trump and his allies had criticized election officials in 2020 for imposing emergency rules without getting legislative approval, to make voting easier during the pandemic.

Trump has long railed against those loosened voting policies, calling easier access to mail voting, for instance, “a big scam” and baselessly alleging that less restrictive ballot access helped Democrats to steal the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature, and in numerous legislatures nationwide, have spent the past four years tightening voting policy in an effort, they say, to make it harder to cheat. Democrats say the tightened policies help suppress voter participation.

“Wanting to use flexibility or convenience — that’s a no-no,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, referring to the Republican position. “But when it’s your base of political supporters, opinions change.”

The Trump campaign has asked for a similar easing of voting rules in Florida, which was walloped in rapid succession by two storms: Helene and then Milton. Trump also encouraged his supporters in Nevada ahead of a rally in Reno this month to bring their completed mail ballots to the rally and hand them over to campaign staff.

Ballot collection is legal in Nevada, but not in other states. Trump has long assailed the practice, accusing Democrats of illegal ballot “harvesting.”

The Trump campaign has taken an at-times combative tone to its North Carolina demands. A news release Thursday from Michael Whatley, the national chairman of the Republican Party and a former North Carolina state party chairman, demanded that Henderson County, a rural community south of Asheville, open additional early voting locations and called it “unacceptable” that it had not.

Although the state board and legislature authorized such expansions, it has been up to counties to decide whether they needed to act on them.

The Henderson election board, which is controlled by a Democratic majority, made a decision in April to open a single early-voting location based on past interest. Lines have been minimal, officials said, and early-voting data after two days shows turnout has been nearly on par with the rest of the state.

Nearly all early voting sites in western North Carolina were able to open on time last week, despite the devastation from the storm. Preliminary early voting data from across the state shows robust participation among both Republicans and Democrats — a shift from 2020, when Democrats outperformed Republicans dramatically in the early vote.

Appearing in Asheville on Monday, Trump congratulated voters in the storm-ravaged west for getting out to cast their ballots.

“The thing that amazes me most is areas such as this and others, where it’s so hard to vote,” he said. “People have lost their homes. They’ve sometimes lost members of their family. You know, they’ve set a record in voting. Can you believe it?”

Three of the 25 initial disaster counties show far lower turnout rates so far than the state overall, but the rest are close to or on par with the statewide proportions, Bitzer said.

This is the first presidential election in which a strict new voter ID law requires those who vote by mail to obtain the signatures of two witnesses and include a copy of their identification in the ballot envelope — a rule initiated by Republicans that is expected to dramatically reduce the mail vote this year.

In an interview, Whatley said the RNC was largely happy with North Carolina officials and that voting had been smooth thus far. He said he believed a record numbers of early voters was a good sign for the Republican Party.

“We’re very glad the state legislators as well as the governor and the boards of elections have gotten the rules set up in a way that is going to allow the voters the access they need,” Whatley said.

Trump campaign workers have fanned out across western North Carolina, Blair said, looking for voters at food distribution sites and contacting them via phone or text. The campaign is also reviewing options for transportation for voters who are affected and need help getting to the polls.

Bob Phillips, who leads the voting rights advocacy group Common Cause North Carolina, said he was pleased to see the Republican legislature agree to the changes that the Democratic-controlled State Board of Elections asked for. The legislature even went further, extending the provisions to all 25 counties initially granted federal disaster status and doubling the amount of emergency funding provided for election administration.

Phillips was less surprised to see both the Trump team and the legislature stop short of pushing to reinstate the grace period that was repealed in recent years allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be accepted up to three days after.

“Making voting harder has been the mantra, unfortunately, of the majority party here,” Phillips said. “So for those of us who do this kind of work, we were relieved and heartened to see this legislature pass things with the Republicans behind them.”

All Donald Trump wants from Fox News is for it to operate as an explicit arm of his political campaign. Just that. Just no more people who criticize Trump and no Democrats and no anti-Trump ads until Election Day. It’s a simple request, really, and one that would certainly not be too much of a lift for the cable-news channel.

Trump’s complaints are certainly not without justification. After all, in new swing-state polling conducted by The Washington Post in partnership with Schar School, Trump’s support among the Fox News viewership was somewhat south of what the former president might wish, which is something akin to Kim Jong Un’s support among North Koreans.

Our poll included more than 5,000 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We asked questions both about vote choice — who voters preferred, planned to vote for or had voted for — and media sources. Respondents were asked what they would consider to be a main source for their political news, among a number of options from Fox News to YouTube to friends and family.

About a quarter of those who consider Fox News a main source of news say they are considering voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, with about 1 in 6 saying they either already have or definitely plan to. But 6 in 10 say they will definitely vote for or have already voted for Trump. Another 1 in 10 indicate they plan to.

No other source for news has as wide a pro-Trump margin. While registered voters overall (again, in these seven swing states) are evenly split between the candidates, a number of nontraditional sources for political news also have consumers that lean toward Trump. Those who cite social media or podcasts as a main source of news are more likely to indicate support for Trump, for example, as are those who cite local radio as a main source for news.

On the other side, 6 in 10 of those who say that national newspapers or MSNBC are a main source for news indicate that they will definitely support Harris or have already voted for her. Among those who identify NPR as a main source for political news, the figure is 7 in 10. In each case, about 1 in 10 say they are leaning toward Harris, while less than a quarter say they will or might back Trump.

One key difference, of course, is that Fox News has a much larger audience than MSNBC, NPR or national newspaper readers — by at least a 2-to-1 margin in the swing states.

In fact, across the seven states, there were about two registered voters who didn’t identify Fox News as a main source for political news for every registered voter who did. Among those who didn’t identify Fox as a main source for news, Harris had about a 30-point lead. Among those who did, Trump had about a 50-point lead.

Still: Imagine how frustrating it must be to Trump that a sixth of Fox News viewers in swing states say they plan to vote for Harris. The right-wing media universe has grown more robust in recent years, with more outlets and more voices. But Fox News is still its anchor — and even it hasn’t convinced everyone of the need to back Trump’s candidacy. Sure, some of those viewers are also people who use NPR as a main source of news (albeit presumably not many of them). But maybe the problem, instead, is that Fox News occasionally interviews a Democrat.

One thing is clearly true: Trump has more leverage over Fox than he does over MSNBC.

Elon Musk has inserted himself into an American presidential election more than perhaps any other uber-wealthy person in modern history. There is no question that one of the world’s richest people is going to great lengths to speak and spend Donald Trump into the White House.

But could Musk’s latest gambit venture into illegal territory — by paying people to, in effect, register to vote?

With Israeli forces pounding targets in northern Gaza and Lebanon despite U.S. objections, Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked Monday for the Middle East to try to bring about a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas amid signs of Washington’s limited influence over Israeli policy.

The trip — Blinken’s 11th to the region since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel — is almost certainly the final one before the U.S. election, and it was a sign of the Biden administration’s waning power that it received muted attention in Israel as Blinken left Washington. The Hamas-led assault that ignited the fighting killed 1,200 in Israel, its government says, and about 250 were taken hostage. More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to local authorities.