NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams stepped up his assertion that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani falsely reported a crime, likening Giuliani’s recent assault allegations to the notorious “Central Park Karen” saga in which a white woman accused a black man of threatening her and was later charged with filing a false police report.
“Just as we’ve done in other cases (like) where the Karen incident happened in Central Park and other incidents, I believe the DA should look at that when determining what the final outcomes is,” Adams said Wednesday.
A day earlier, Adams suggested that Giuliani falsely reported a crime when he accused Staten Island supermarket worker Daniel Gill of hitting him with the intent of knocking him down. Video of the incident depicts Gill patting the former mayor on the back at the ShopRite he worked at while Giuliani was there campaigning for his son, Andrew, who ultimately lost in his bid to run for governor in November’s general election.
Giuliani has claimed that Gill “hit me to knock me down” and said it felt like a bullet or as “if a boulder hit me.” He also called Adams “an idiot” Tuesday because “I didn’t file a report.”
“Can you imagine that?” Giuliani said. “He wants to prosecute me for a false police report that I didn’t file. His Police Department filed the report. They did the investigation.”
On Wednesday, Adams said Giuliani did, in fact, speak to the NYPD about the incident, a detail which NYPD sources corroborated.
Adams’ mention of the “Karen incident” was a reference to the May 2020 faceoff in which Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper after he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. When Christian, who is unrelated, summoned the pooch, Amy Cooper called the police and said “an African-American man ... is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.”
The term “Karen” is slang for an entitled white woman.
Adams tried to make the case Wednesday that what Giuliani did fell into a similar category.
“The former mayor made several serious allegations. He was videoed saying things that happened. Those things did not happen,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference in lower Manhattan. “Because of his report to the Police Department, a person went to jail for 24 hours.”
The possibility of Giuliani being charged with falsely reporting a crime isn’t the only legal issue he’s now facing.
On Tuesday, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Giuliani requested a pardon from former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington. A day later, Giuliani said in a tweet that “contrary to her false testimony she was never present when I asked for a pardon.”
“Actually, I told the President I did not want or need one,” Giuliani continued in the tweet, which he later deleted.
Adams did not comment on Giuliani’s current D.C. woes, but he suggested on Wednesday that Gill’s jailing was, at least in part, personal for him.
“I don’t know if people know what it’s like being in jail when you did not commit a crime,” said Adams, who was briefly incarcerated as a teenager. “You never get over that. This person’s life has been changed because of what all of us saw. The pat on the back was not a punch to the head, was not knocking someone to the ground.”
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(New York Daily New staff writer Rocco Parascandola contributed to this report).
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