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Dianne Morales calls for Stringer to resign over sex harassment claims

BY THE VILLAGE SUN | After initially saying, “Right now, I’m not focused on Scott Stringer,” Dianne Morales is focusing on him. And, after doing so, she now thinks he should drop out of the mayor’s race — and the comptroller’s office to boot, while he’s at it.

On Tuesday, word first started to get out that a woman was accusing Stringer of sexual harassment and sexual abuse that allegedy occured two decades ago. Jean Kim, a 49-year-old Asian woman, now a lobbyist, held a press conference Wednesday morning, airing her complaint. Stringer, in a press conference of his own, claimed innocence.

Morales, in a statement on Wednesday, expressed support for Kim and survivors of sexual abuse, but did not call for Stringer to leave the mayor’s race or step down as comptroller.

“I continue to stand with Jean Kim and support her demands for justice,” Morales said in a statement late Thursday evening.

“I’ve spent the last 48 hours reflecting on the leadership needed in this moment and beyond,” she said. “Believing survivors means believing them — and standing with them — from the very beginning. My heart goes out to Jean Kim for everything she is enduring in this moment. She has my full and unequivocal support.

“I’m also laser focused on the race at hand, because the last two days only underscore how much is at stake to build an equitable and just city. Unfortunately, it has also become clear that Scott Stringer refuses to take real accountability, and is using this moment to cause more harm. That alone disqualifies him from governing in this city. … Our campaigns should evoke hope and possibility, not triggers and fears.

“The complexities of power, race and white male privilege — and how it impacts all of us — requires a recognition of how those in power are credited with unearned wisdom, intelligence and truth,” Morales said. “Likewise, the challenges of acknowledging violence against women, and the uphill path women of color continue to sojourn while facing humiliation, suppression and immediate skepticism are all deeply rooted in the fabric of this very nation and city. I cannot attempt to fit all of my thoughts, emotions and analyses into the four corners of any page. I will, however, finish the job at hand: to fight with the people for a city every New Yorker deserves.

“I empathize with Jean Kim, who for almost two days now has had her character questioned and, in so many ways, deserves so much more support from those who hashtag ‘believe survivors.’ Scott Stringer must withdraw from the mayoral race and resign. And our city must move on with determining who has the strongest momentum, strategy and experience to protect all of us — especially the ones we still struggle to believe.”

15 Comments

  1. Bill Weinberg Bill Weinberg May 10, 2021

    Apologists for ugly regimes (left, right, East, West, Arab, Jewish, whatev) always find a way to diss the human rights groups that document their crimes.

  2. Patricia Melvin Patricia Melvin May 1, 2021

    What happened to innocent until proven guilty? One person’s accusations are enough to cost Stringer important endorsements? What’s going on here?! Anti-democratic mob mentality and unworthy of our city.

    • mary reinholz mary reinholz May 2, 2021

      Yes, the autocratic rush to judgment against Stringer by his self-serving Dem rivals in the mayor’s race plus the instant rescinding of his endorsements over unproven accusations of sexual harassment are enough to make this longtime New Yorker from sunny California much more interested in voting for Stringer June 22 than I was before the current ah snowstorm. Meanwhile, his accuser is having lotsa fun in her debut as a standup comic.

  3. JackDog JackDog May 1, 2021

    Two wrongs don’t make a right.

  4. Bill Weinberg Bill Weinberg May 1, 2021

    There is nothing “anti-Semitic” about calling Israel an “apartheid state.” This is the determination of Human Rights Watch in a report issued last week, as well as the Israeli human rights goup B’Tselem. Are you gonna call them “anti-Semitic”? Really?

    • elliot weinberg elliot weinberg May 9, 2021

      HRW director Ken Roth suggested in 2014 that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is the reason why Jews on the continent keep getting insulted, spat at, beaten up, and even kidnapped and murdered. In other words, Jews are responsible for anti-semitism.

      Due to the organization’s failures, founder Robert Bernstein published an article in the New York Times (“Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” October 19, 2009) strongly criticizing the organization for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israel bias, and for “issuing reports…that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

      In July 2006, in responding to a critique of HRW’s reporting of the Lebanon War, Roth stated: “An eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law…” The New York Sun decried this statement as a “slur on the Jewish religion itself that is breathtaking in its ignorance… To suggest that Judaism is a ‘primitive’ religion incompatible with contemporary morality is to engage in supersessionism, the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much antisemitism.”

      In February 2020, it was revealed that Executive Director Ken Roth accepted a donation in 2012 from a Saudi real estate tycoon for $470,000 “promising not to support advocacy of the LGBT community in the Middle East and North Africa.”

      I could go on and on, but yes Human Rights Watch is Anti-semitic.

  5. Harry Pincus Harry Pincus April 30, 2021

    Holy Poop!

    What are you doing for the Palestinians? Have you gone over there and actually helped anyone? Have you donated money to help? Or is your “support” merely restricted to anti-semitic mutterings under a phony name? What’s your name, sister, or brother?

    Do you live under a rock, holy mole-y? Did your parents speak unkindly about Jews when you were a child? Are you sad that Hitler committed suicide on this day, 76 years ago? Perhaps you think he was a “progressive” too.

    I support Palestinian rights.
    I support the rights of all people to a decent standard of living, to a hopeful future for their children, and a peaceful existence, but I do not support the “right” of a people or a government to refuse to recognize the right of another people to exist.

    I do not accept the right of the hole-y moles of this world to single out tiny Israel as the source of all of the world’s injustice, and carry on the age old tradition of anti-semitism, while calling themselves “progressive.” Hatred and exclusion is not progress.

    As for the mayoral race, I simply wanted to point out that Ms. Morales’s comments about Israel are out of keeping with those of the other mayoral candidates. She is an outlier, who seeks to lead a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.

    I grew up in Brooklyn, in the 1950s. Among the many “survivors” of the Holocaust who lived in my neighborhood were members of my own my family. My cousin Abe was a slave in the 1940s. When I asked him if he ever saw Dr. Mengele, the Doctor of Death at Auschwitz, he said “Mengele? He was my doctor.” It was Mengele who condemned Abe’s wife and their baby to death upon their arrival.

    None of this is being taught today, and these days, any college student who wants to identify as a Jew is likely to be harassed on campus.
    Neo-Nazis are on the march, in the United States, and glass is being shattered once again.

    As a Jew, I have always felt a sense of protection in this great city. If we elect a mayor who reviles Israel, it will feel different to live here.

    As Ms. Morales’s opinions in regard to Israel are not widely known, I think that voters should be informed about them, so that they can make an informed decision about what life might be like here under her leadership.

  6. Holy Moly Holy Moly April 30, 2021

    Stringer is a big real estate candidate, as bad as Yang or Adams. He supported the Columbia (West Harlem) expansion, taking people’s property by eminent domain. He’s a big supporter of Hudson Yards, the Soho and Gowanus rezonings and other displacements.

    • mary reinholz mary reinholz May 1, 2021

      He knows a lot more about the inner workings of the city than most of his other “democratic” rivals who have shown themselves to be totally opportunistic after Stringer was hit with a a sexual harassment going back 20 years. His accuser is now joking about it as a standup comic. What jackasses these people are. They are indefensible.

  7. mary reinholz mary reinholz April 30, 2021

    So dreary and undemocratic for Morales to judge Scott Stringer guilty on the basis of a 20-year-old unsubstantiated accusation. She won’t get my vote.

  8. harry pincus harry pincus April 30, 2021

    Does Holy Moly have a name? What is Holy about Holy Moly?

    If you are referring to the despicable Tucker Carlson, perhaps you ought to begin his first name with an “F” instead of a “T” as far as I’m concerned.

    I’ve devoted my life as an artist to human rights for many years, and paid the price, professionally and personally, so I need not not be maligned for calling out anti-Semitism when I see it.

    • Holy Moly Holy Moly April 30, 2021

      Named after Pope Moly. To support the rights of Palestinians is not anti-Semitism, Tucker.

  9. Harry Pincus Harry Pincus April 30, 2021

    By the way, I would remind Ms. Morales that many Israelis are also “survivors.”

  10. Harry Pincus Harry Pincus April 30, 2021

    Not only is Dianne Morales ready to throw sexy Scott Stringer off the bus, but according to the Forward, she has also told Jewish high school students that Israel is an “apartheid state”, and that she would be prepared as mayor of New York City, to travel there, in order to show sympathy for the Palestinian “folks”. I guess the Israelis aren’t even folks.

    I understand that such sentiments are popular these days, but it is disturbing to me, at least, that so called “progressives”, such as Ms. Morales and “the squad” are so blatantly anti-semitic. I know this is an argument I cannot win with many of my old friends, who casually describe the Israelis to me as “baby killers” or people who “smash babies’ heads against walls” and could care less about the missiles that are regularly dispatched to kill Jews by the good folk that Ms. Morales longs to visit.

    So be it. I’m just saying, that if you want a mayor who will hate Israel, by all means, vote for Dianne Morales, whoever she is.

    • Holy Moly Holy Moly April 30, 2021

      Thanks, Tucker.

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