*Amid the backlash over her handling of the Central Park Five case following the release of the Netflix series “When They See Us,” prosecutor Linda Fairstein has reportedly resigned from her positions with Vassar College and the board of directors at the God’s Love We Deliver charity and Safe Horizon nonprofit, New York Daily News reports.
Meanwhile, a petition calling for Amazon and other retailers to stop selling Fairstein’s books has received over 47,000 signatures, Yahoo.com reports
The campaign was launched after Netflix released the Ava DuVernay-directed series, which depicts Fairstein (played by Felicity Huffman) as pushy prosecutor hell-bent on charging the five Black and Latino teens without solid evidence.
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The petition states, “Linda Fairstein achieved her fame & fortune through her wild imagination & at the expense of five INNOCENT children’s pain.”
The folks behind the petition argue that “Linda Fairstein led a witch hunt against five teenage boys even though the physical evidence didn’t support her theory she raged on with one goal in mind & that was to get a conviction at any expense even the lives of teenage boys.”
The petition wants “ALL retailers & book publishers to stop selling Linda Fairstein books or any product that has ties to her.”
The hashtag #cancellindafairstein began trending after the series dropped and many viewers are outraged that she continues to profit off her fictional crime novels.
Meanwhile, in wake of the former Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor resigning Tuesday from several nonprofit boards, Fairstein issued a letter to the chairman of the Safe Horizon, stating that she wanted to spare the organization from grief through association with her, the report states.
“I do not want to become a lightning rod to inflict damage on this organization, because of those now attacking my record of fighting for social justice for more than 45 years,” she wrote.
It has also emerged that Fairstein tried to control DuVernay’s script, the acclaimed director revealed in an interview with The Daily Beast.
DuVernay said she reached out to Fairstein and other key figures, and “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.”
She said, “Linda Fairstein actually tried to negotiate. I don’t know if I’ve told anyone this, but 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.”
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