Five men who were wrongly convicted as teenagers in the so-called Central Park Five jogger rape case sued Donald Trump on Monday, saying the Republican presidential candidate defamed them by falsely claiming they had killed someone and themselves pleaded guilty.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, cites several statements Trump made about the men during his Sept. 10 debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris after she criticized Trump for running an ad in 1989 , in which the defendants, who were still young at the time, were called to be executed.

“Defendant Trump falsely stated (at the debate) that plaintiffs had killed a person and pleaded guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the civil lawsuit states.

“The plaintiffs never pleaded guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, the victims of the Central Park attacks were not killed,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s behavior toward the men at the debate was “part of an ongoing pattern of extreme and outrageous behavior dating back several years and thus constitutes an ongoing tort.”

The plaintiffs in this case, now referred to as the Exonerated Five, are Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise. Salaam is a member of the New York City Council.

Her lawsuit, which alleges defamation, false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeks more than $75,000 in damages, with all compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement provided by the campaign: “This is just another frivolous election interference lawsuit filed by desperate left-wing activists to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’ dangerously liberal agenda and failed campaign.”

“Lyin’ Kamala’s allies’ frantic efforts to interfere in the election are going nowhere and President Trump is dominating as he marches to a historic victory for the American people on November 5th,” Cheung said.

The lawsuit notes that the men were convicted in trials while still teenagers of a series of assaults in New York’s Central Park in April 1989. The men were between 14 and 16 years old at the time and spent several years in prison there after their conviction.

Less than two weeks after a sexual assault on a jogger in the park that the teenagers were accused of, Trump paid for a full-page ad in New York newspapers that “alluded to the attacks in Central Park without specifically naming the suspects.” The city of New York should “send a clear and unambiguous message to those who would murder our citizens and terrorize New York: BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE,” the lawsuit says.

All five men were exonerated of allegations that they raped the jogger in 2002 based on newly discovered DNA evidence.

A year later, the men sued New York City for false arrest, malicious prosecution and racial conspiracy. The city settled the lawsuit more than a decade later by agreeing to pay the men $41 million, a deal that Trump called a “disgrace” in a newspaper op-ed this year.

At the presidential debate in September, Harris said: “Let us remember that this is the same person (Trump) who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five innocent black and Latino boys. “The Central Park Five.”

“Put out a full-page ad calling for her execution,” Harris added, the lawsuit says.

Trump responded to Harris by saying, “They admitted – they said they pleaded guilty.”

“And I said, well, if they pleaded guilty, they seriously injured and ultimately killed a person. And when they pleaded guilty, they maintained that we were not guilty,” Trump said.

Trump was previously held liable in two separate defamation lawsuits against writer E. Jean Carroll after she publicly alleged that he raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Jurors awarded Carroll a total of $88.3 million in damages after trials in those cases, including damages after he was found to have sexually abused the writer.

Trump is appealing the verdicts in those cases, which were filed in federal court in Manhattan.