{"id":169358,"date":"2026-03-20T16:26:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T16:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/169358\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T16:26:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T16:26:14","slug":"nyc-mayor-zohran-mamdani-kept-calling-his-wife-a-private-person-then-her-x-account-disappeared","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/169358\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Kept Calling His Wife a \u2018Private Person.\u2019 Then Her X Account Disappeared"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a line about his wife. He\u2019s used it three times now. It goes like this: \u201cMy wife is the love of my life, and she\u2019s also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall.\u201d<\/p>\n

He first used it after reports that his wife, Rama Duwaji, had liked Instagram posts that described the Hamas-led Oct. 7 invasion as \u201cbreaking the walls of apartheid\u201d<\/a> and \u201cresisting apartheid since 1948.\u201d He returned to the same separation argument days later when asked about her illustration for a Susan Abulhawa project. And after the latest report about old social media accounts, Newsweek noted that Mamdani had previously stressed that Duwaji was a \u201cprivate person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three revelations. Two weeks. The same sentence hanging over all of them. And as of Thursday, the old X account, where much of the latest material was posted, appeared to have been deactivated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Week One: The Likes<\/p>\n

Reporting in early March said Duwaji liked Instagram posts shared on the day of the Oct. 7 attack that described the invasion as \u201cbreaking the walls of apartheid\u201d and \u201cresisting apartheid since 1948.\u201d Other liked posts supported protests against Israel the following day. Mamdani, then facing questions about the posts, said his support for Palestinian liberation should never be confused for \u201ca celebration of the loss of civilian life\u201d and condemned rhetoric at a rally that sought to make light of those deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the same day, Mamdani was telling Politico that line, his then-girlfriend was liking posts that critics read as doing exactly what he said he opposed. City Hall\u2019s response: She\u2019s a private person.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

One of the Oct. 7 posts at the center of the first round of scrutiny. Credit: Screenshot via Instagram<\/p>\n

Week Two: The Hoax and the Illustration<\/p>\n

Days later, further reporting said Duwaji had also liked an Instagram post that referred to The New York Times\u2019 investigation into sexual violence during Oct. 7 as a \u201cmass rape hoax.\u201d Around the same time, scrutiny also landed on an illustration she contributed to an essay in a collection that included work by Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American author whose past language about Jews and Israelis Mamdani called \u201cpatently unacceptable\u201d and \u201creprehensible<\/a>.\u201d His office said Duwaji had been commissioned by a third party as a freelance illustrator, had never met the author, and had no role in the administration. On the broader question of his wife\u2019s public baggage, the answer was functionally the same.<\/p>\n

\"Duwaji\u2019s<\/p>\n

Duwaji\u2019s profile is central to the story, even when City Hall insists she is not part of it. Credit: NYC Mayor\u2019s Office<\/p>\n

Week Three: The Old Accounts<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, the Free Beacon published its most damaging report. The outlet said it linked Duwaji to old X and Tumblr accounts by cross-referencing usernames<\/a>, tagged photos, birthday references, a pet cat\u2019s name, and location details. Newsweek later said it could not independently verify that the accounts belonged to her. That caveat matters. So does what the report alleged was on them.<\/p>\n

Among the posts the Free Beacon attributed to those accounts were a 2013 tweet using the n-word, a 2015 retweet praising Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, a 2015 post saying Tel Aviv \u201cshouldn\u2019t exist in the first place,\u201d a 2017 Tumblr post featuring Leila Khaled with the caption \u201cIf it does good for my cause, I\u2019ll be happy to accept death,\u201d and a repost blaming \u201cwhite people\u201d for creating al Qaeda. Khaled participated in airplane hijackings in 1969 and 1970.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The old-account report landed because it moved beyond likes and into attributed posts. Screenshot: Jon Levine\/X<\/p>\n

By Thursday, the X account \u2014 @_RamaDee \u2014 appeared to have been deactivated. Newsweek said social media activity on X suggested other users were still able to respond to old posts as recently as Thursday, and it said it was unclear who deleted the account.<\/p>\n

The Defense That Didn\u2019t Evolve<\/p>\n

Mamdani defending his wife isn’t the issue. That\u2019s what spouses do. The issue is that the defense didn\u2019t evolve even as the story did.<\/p>\n

Week one was Instagram likes \u2014 something that could at least be waved away as passive engagement. Week two was a \u201cmass rape hoax\u201d like plus an illustration connection to an author, Mamdani himself, called reprehensible. Week three was a resurfaced old-account story that the Free Beacon laid out in detail, and Newsweek treated more cautiously, but not dismissively. Each round got worse. And through all of it, the same line kept doing the work.<\/p>\n

That line works exactly once. Used over and over, it stops being a defense and starts being a strategy \u2014 one built on the assumption that if the mayor keeps saying she doesn\u2019t work here, the story will eventually go away. The account\u2019s disappearance suggests the story is not going away on its own.<\/p>\n

Journalist Ryan Grim argued that the Free Beacon was now going after Mamdani\u2019s wife for posts she made at 15. Policy analyst Josh Appel fired back: \u201cFixed it for you: Rama Duwaji has been going after Jews since she was 15.\u201d That exchange captures the two poles<\/a>. But it misses the middle \u2014 a mayor who publicly condemned the Oct. 7 rally while his partner was privately liking posts tied to it, and who has answered three escalating flareups with essentially the same copy-pasted line.<\/p>\n

At some point, \u201cshe\u2019s a private person\u201d stops answering the question and becomes the question itself. We passed that point a while ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a line about his wife. He\u2019s used it three times now.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[302,69407,48314,9,56,63,65,7733,64,18510,69406,82],"class_list":["post-169358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-city-hall","tag-instagram-likes","tag-instagram-posts","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-mayor","tag-nyc-news","tag-rama-duwaji","tag-susan-abulhawa","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169358","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=169358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}