Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was allegedly slapped while shopping in Staten Island.
“What’s up, scumbag?” the person allegedly shouted, according to the police report.
New York City Police said the man was an employee at the grocery store, ShopRite, that Giuliani was shopping in.
“All of a sudden, I feel this ‘Bam!’ on my back,” Giuliani told The New York Post. “I don’t know if they helped me not fall down, but I just about fell down, but I didn’t.
“I feel this tremendous pain in my back, and I’m thinking, what the — I didn’t even know what it was,” he reportedly said. “All of a sudden, I hear this guy say, ‘You’re a f**king scumbag,’ then he moves away so nobody can grab him.
“And he says, ‘You, you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women,’” Giuliani told the NY Post the alleged attacker said. “‘You and your f–king friend are gonna kill women.’ Then he starts yelling out all kinds of, just curses, and every once in a while, he puts in that woman thing.”
“‘You guys think you’re saving babies, but you’re gonna kill women,’” Giuliani said the attacker told him.
The former mayor later told a talk radio station the slap left like “somebody shot me.”
“Luckily, I’m a 78-year-old who is in pretty good shape,” he reportedly said. “If I wasn’t, I would have hit the ground and probably cracked my skull.”
Giuliani said he was ultimately not hurt. Video surveillance from the incident makes it seem much less serious than Giuliani made it out to be.
39-year-old Daniel Gill, a ShopRite employee, was arrested and initially charged with second-degree assault, a felony, although those charges were later downgraded.
“The video is clear,” Gill’s attorney, Susan Platis, told New York’s ABC7. “The video is clear that this was just a tap on the back.”
Here’s video of the incident, where Rudy Giuliani said the slap felt like “somebody shot me”
“If I wasn’t [in good shape], I would have hit the ground and probably cracked my skull” https://t.co/7JyOMvyqbX
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) June 26, 2022
Andrew Giuliani, son of the former New York City mayor, is running to become the Republican nominee for governor of New York. Him and his father were campaigning at a supermarket on Staten Island during the attack.
The campaign is considered a long shot, with the favored U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin as the presumed front-runner in the Republican race with the endorsements of the state’s GOP and Conservative Party. And in an otherwise favorable year for Republicans, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to win the office in November.
New York is one of the bluest states in the country, where Democrats have more than twice as many registered voters as Republicans and have held the governor’s mansion for 15 years. It’s also a state where — outside of Republican voters — the only name less popular than “Trump” might be “Giuliani.”
The 36-year-old worked as an aide in Trump’s White House and as a commentator on the conservative network Newsmax, but has never held elected office before.
“The assault on my father, America’s Mayor, was over politics,” his son said. “As governor I will stand up for law and order so that New Yorkers feel safe again.
Though Trump has issued endorsements in primaries around the country, he has not issued one for Giuliani or Zeldin, a staunch ally.
“I think Trump wonders if he would help or hurt,” Giuliani mused last week.
Rudy Giuliani has sought to assure people that his son’s experience includes watching his father serve as mayor.
“It is true he was a child during most of my tenure, but I don’t know. Do you consider a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old a child? He worked with me on those things when I was there,” Giuliani said at a news conference on Thursday. “In many of those situations, your candidate Andrew Giuliani has helped me. He knows it backwards and forwards from the time he was a kid.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article