The New York City Council\u2019s ethics committee has charged Councilmember Vickie Paladino with violating the body\u2019s rules for repeatedly posting Islamophobic content on social media.<\/p>\n
The Committee on Rules, Privileges, Elections, Standards and Ethics charged the Republican lawmaker from Queens with \u201cengaging in disorderly behavior\u201d and violating the Council\u2019s anti-harassment and discrimination policy, Council spokesperson Jack Lobel said after a closed-door committee vote Monday.<\/p>\n
Paladino, 71, has five days to provide a written response, and she will be scheduled to appear before the committee in the coming weeks, Lobel said. Pending further action by the committee, the full Council could vote to censure or fine Paladino, expel her from the Council, or impose other sanctions, according to the Council\u2019s rules. Such measures would require a two-thirds vote of the Council.<\/p>\n
Paladino, who for years has represented a swath of Northeast Queens extending from College Point to Little Neck, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a post<\/a> Tuesday evening on X, Paladino accused the ethics committee of responding to \u201cpolitical pressure\u201d from City Council Speaker Julie Menin and pursuing an \u201cunconstitutional scheme to violate my First Amendment rights.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMake no mistake, this mockery of the First Amendment will not stand,” she wrote. “My legal team will respond to this egregious violation of my rights swiftly.\u201d<\/p>\n The charges filed by the ethics panel mark an escalation in the body’s oversight of Paladino, whose comments on social media have long been a matter of official concern. Menin told<\/a> Gothamist in late February she had directed the committee to meet \u201cas soon as possible\u201d to conclude an ongoing investigation into Paladino’s remarks on social media.<\/p>\n Menin\u2019s directive followed a Feb. 17 tweet in which Paladino criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s appointment of Faiza Ali, a Muslim American woman and former Council staffer born and raised in Brooklyn, as the city\u2019s chief immigration officer<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cNew York is under foreign occupation. There’s really no other way to put it,\u201d Paladino posted<\/a>. \u201cDoes this administration have one single actual American in it?\u201d<\/p>\n Menin condemned<\/a> the remarks in a social media post of her own, stating, \u201cThis Islamophobic rhetoric is deeply offensive.\u201d Menin added, \u201cI condemn it in the strongest terms.\u201d Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, a Democrat who sits on the ethics committee, said in a post<\/a> that \u201cRacism and Islamophobia have no place in City Hall.\u201d<\/p>\n More recently, Paladino criticized Mamdani for praying with sanitation workers before the recent blizzard.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is part of Islamic conquest,\u201d Paladino wrote in a Feb. 23 tweet<\/a>. \u201cThe message is very clear \u2014 we are being replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n Krishnan responded to Paladino\u2019s Feb. 23 remarks: \u201cVickie’s relentless Islamophobic comments are not reflective of the values of New Yorkers and create an unsafe working environment within the City Council.\u201d He added: \u201cThere must be immediate accountability and consequences \u2014 this language, repeatedly, cannot be tolerated.\u201d<\/p>\n Paladino has previously used her social media account to call for the deportation<\/a> of Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Uganda. She has also called for the \u201cexpulsion<\/a> of Muslims from Western nations.\u201d<\/p>\n Paladino subsequently deleted the latter post, after Menin said she asked<\/a> her to do so. But Paladino followed up by publishing an op-ed<\/a> in the Queens Jewish Link that doubled down on her views, calling for the mass deportation of \u201cradical Muslims and those who support them,\u201d and creating a legal framework for denaturalization. Those comments spurred calls to censure Paladino, including from prominent Muslim organizations<\/a> and the Council\u2019s progressive caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n Under previous Speaker Adrienne Adams, the Council voted to remove<\/a> Paladino from the Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction months after an investigation<\/a> into her anti-LGBTQ<\/a> conduct. At the start of the Council\u2019s new session in January, Menin stripped Paladino of all but two of her committee assignments, citing her offensive social media posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York City Council\u2019s ethics committee has charged Councilmember Vickie Paladino with violating the body\u2019s rules for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":{"0":"post-152814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-ny","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-nyc-headlines","12":"tag-nyc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}