The man who single handedly helped spearhead the meteoric rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now says the firebrand progressive has turned her back on the very people she says she committed to helping.
The shocking rebuke from one of AOC’s most liberal confidants has stirred up doubt whether AOC’s future political ambitions will fall flat.
Ramon Ramirez Baez, an author and former Democrat committee member for the 39th Assembly District who helped AOC build historic grassroots support before her first election win said in a scathing interview that the liberal lawmaker has abandoned and “betrayed” her constituents in a Queens neighborhood that has been riddled with crime under her leadership, including open-air prostitution, robberies and petty crime.
Baez said the quality of life in AOC’s district has rapidly deteriorated since her historic upset in 2018, unseating longtime Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley to become the nation’s youngest congresswoman.
Many constituents have likened conditions along Roosevelt Avenue (a popular street in AOC’s district) to those of a Third World country, while others say the migrant women soliciting sex in front of businesses remind them of a red-light district in Bangkok.
The area has garnered national attention for its unsanitary nature where illegal vendors overtake sidewalks selling unregulated food, secondhand clothing and other counterfeit merchandise.
Ramirez Baez said that AOC promised to work hard for the people of Corona, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst and to be an on-the-ground presence for them, unlike career politician Crowley, who at that point was a 10-term incumbent and eyeing to be the next House speaker.
According to Ramirez Baez, AOC reached out to him for help when she had about $39,000 in the bank, compared to Crowley’s nearly $2 million.
According to a Fox News report, Ramirez Baez is well-connected in the area, particularly among his fellow Dominican immigrants, and introduced Ocasio-Cortez to many business owners, campaigned with her and even forked out the cash to pay for their debate venue, he said.
The move proved crucial as Crowley never turned up, and Ramirez Baez said it swung the momentum to AOC.
“I paid for that debate, I have an invoice for everything I did for Ms. Alexandria,” Ramirez Baez said, waving a document to the camera. He said he has all his expenses from her campaign documented in one of the many books he has written about her.
But since AOC’s rose to power, Ramirez Baez said she has been missing in action and has acted no differently from Crowley.
“We never saw that lady, never, she disappeared,” he told Fox News Digital. “She [didn’t] do anything for the community, nothing, nothing.”
“She disappeared from my community. You never saw Alexandria in my community, nobody saw her in her office. All the time, closed,” he said of her Queens office, which was located a block from his own apartment.
Ramirez Baez said locals don’t know how to get in touch with her office as she doesn’t appear to have any in Queens. Ocasio-Cortez’s website lists an office in Queens, by appointment only, which is the same address as the office of New York City Councilwoman Tiffany Caban.
“What happened? You have to be [in the] community to do an event,” he said. “She never did any event. I never saw Alexandria come to do a town hall meeting, to listen to the community, nothing. She disappeared.”
“She goes all over the place, like a movie star, she goes to Texas, all over the place, but what about the community?”
Ramirez Baez bluntly said that he has buyer’s remorse about AOC, and that he did not know about her socialist leanings at the time.
“If she said to me, she is socialist, I would never support it,” Ramirez Baez declared. He said that part of her socialist agenda is an open-border policy with regard to immigration, which he opined has contributed to the decline of the neighborhood as many illegal vendors and sex workers on Roosevelt Avenue are migrants who have no jobs or work permits and also clog up resources.
Ramirez Baez told the Daily Mail he wants to apologize to the community for endorsing her and feels she lied when she told him he was like a brother to her.