In the first episode of the Netflix mini-series When They See Us, New York prosecutor Linda Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman, sits in front of a map of Central Park as five teenage boys sit in the precinct. After a woman was brutally raped in the park, the authorities brought in those who they believed were in the vicinity.
But in a key scene about halfway through the episode, the focus of the conversation with Kevin Richardson, 15, Raymond Santana, 14, Antron McCray, 15, Yusef Salaam, 15, and Korey Wise, 16, changed.
"All this is happening in the park ... and it's not connected?" the Fairstein character says, looking at the times in which the boys were apparently in the park. "They're not witnesses. They're suspects."
anyone present during the interrogation process that these five men were participants, not only in the other attacks that night but in the attack on the jogger."
Fairstein lives in Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard and has written a series of books about the protagonist Alexandra Cooper, a fictional Manhattan assistant district attorney. Her most recent, Blood Oath, was released just last month. Her books have been New York Times bestsellers and have been translated to 12 languages. She's also written Devlin Quick Mysteries for kids.
In 2018, the Mystery Writers of America awarded her their prestigious Grand Master title, a lifetime achievement award. But just two days later, the group rescinded the award for the first time after the decision was met with fierce backlash from other authors because of Fairstein's involvement in the Central Park Five case.
Filmmaker DuVernay reached out to Fairstein when she was working on the miniseries. And Fairstein tried to control how she was portrayed, according to DuVernay.
"Yes, I reached out to [victim] Ms. [Trisha] Meili, I reached out to Ms. Fairstein, I reached out to [prosecutor] Ms. [Elizabeth] Lederer, I reached out to [detective] Mr. [Mike] Sheehan—a lot of the key figures on the other side," DuVernay told The Daily Beast. "I informed them that I was making the film, that they would be included, and invited them to sit with me and talk with me so that they could share their point of view and their side of things so that I could have that information as I wrote the script with my co-writers. Linda Fairstein actually tried to negotiate.
"She tried to negotiate conditions for her to speak with me, including approvals over the script and some other things. So you know what my answer was to that, and we didn't talk."
A change.org petition calls for publishers and booksellers to stop the production and sales of Fairstein's novels. As of this writing, more than 13,000 have signed it. The boycott has the support of at least one of the men of the so-called Central Park Five, as well.
The explosive Netflix series "When They See Us," which depicts in excruciating detail the so-called Central Park Five being railroaded by New York state into serving prison time for the rape and assault of the Central Park jogger in 1989, has social media demanding book retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble stop selling the mystery novels written by Linda Fairstein
Three days after the premiere, a #CancelLindaFairstein campaign is going viral — and has even expanded to include one of her publishers, Simon & Schuster, by way of a #BOYCOTTSIMONSCHUSTER tag. Angie Thomas, author of the young adult best-seller "The Hate You Give," also called out Fairstein's other publisher, Penguin Random House.
To this day, Fairstein stands by the initial verdicts, even though Mattias Ryes confessedto the crime in 2002 and the convictions against the five young men were vacated. Scores of incensed viewers took to Twitter to register their outrage — and DuVernay herself weighed in on the brewing controversy.
Today, Fairstein deactivated her Facebook and Twitter accounts . After all this time the pressure is finally getting to her.
