New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for a look by the relevant district attorney into potentially charging Rudy Giuliani with filing a false police report for his response to an incident at a grocery store in Staten Island. An employee lightly slapped Giuliani on the back, and Rudy’s had a full-blown meltdown about it, leading some to questions about the legitimacy of his complaints.
“He could have easily hit me… knocked me to the ground and killed me,” Giuliani said. “The most dangerous thing for elderly people is a fall. It happens in the home often — not some criminal coming up to you and banging you on the back as hard as he could because he’s angry at you, because he disagrees with you politically.” Giuliani claimed the employee to have targeted him because of his anti-abortion beliefs. “He hit me to knock me down. If that doesn’t get you jail time in New York, then we have the wild west here… He started telling me I’m killing women, because of abortion. No no, I’m saving babies,” Rudy said.
Adams, meanwhile, remarked on Wednesday: “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 outcome is.” What happened in that so-called Karen incident was a white woman named Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man (of no relation to Amy), after (among other things) he asked for her to put her dog on a leash. Christian was birdwatching in an area of Central Park where having dogs on leashes is required. Amy was initially charged with filing a false police report, although the charge was dropped following her completion of an educational course.
Adams added: “The former mayor made several serious allegations. He was videoed saying things that happened. Those things did not happen… Because of his report to the Police Department, a person went to jail for 24 hours… I don’t know if people know what it’s like being in jail when you did not commit a crime… 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.” Rudy was out campaigning for his son, Andrew, in the GOP primary race for New York’s governorship at the time of the original incident. Andrew ended up losing the race by a large margin to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.). With over 95 percent of the vote tabulated Thursday, Andrew was down by more than 20 percentage points.
Giuliani angrily responded to previous comments Adams made about the Trump ally’s deceptive representation of what happened, complaining that the NYC mayor “wants to prosecute me for a false police report that I didn’t file. His Police Department filed the report. They did the investigation.” In fact, law enforcement obtained information about what happened from Rudy. “On Wednesday, Adams said Giuliani did, in fact, speak to the NYPD about the incident, a detail which NYPD sources corroborated,” the New York Daily News reports. Rudy should just stop talking publicly — it’d make the public have one less headache and probably even help him legally.
