Salaam was chosen as the Democratic candidate in June’s primary election and ran unopposed in Tuesday’s race to represent a central district in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood.
His city council victory came 20 years after he and the other four men, known as the “Central Park Five,” sued New York City for wrongful conviction and violation of their civil rights, eventually winning a $41 settlement in 2014.
Former President Donald Trump, then a real estate developer in New York, publicly denounced the teenagers and took out a full-page ad in several of the city’s newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
Trump refused to recant his incorrect claims about the case when a reporter asked him about them in 2019, saying, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”
Referring to Trump now facing multiple criminal trials, Salaam in an interview with the New York Times on Tuesday night said: “Karma is real, and we have to remember that.”
For Trump, it is not karma as much as it is just his sort of behaviour that is getting harder and harder to pull off in our modern, connected and less private world.