A left-wing state lawmaker who has pushed for slicing police funding first moved to the district she is searching for to signify in Congress as a result of “issues of safety” close to “the tasks” in Harlem prompted her to shack up together with her tech bro then-fiancé within the Monetary District, The Submit has realized.
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Decrease Manhattan) informed an area publication in 2016 — when she was campaigning to initially get elected to her present seat — that she headed to the wealthier Manhattan neighborhood as a result of she witnessed a pair of disturbing crimes and fell sufferer to 1.
“I truly was robbed after I was residing in Harlem. My boyfriend on the time, my fiancé, didn’t assume I used to be secure up there, so he informed me to maneuver in, and in order that’s how I moved to the Monetary District with him,” she defined in an interview with the Lo-Down NY. “He was already residing there.”
4 years later, the since-updated points part for her most up-to-date Meeting marketing campaign learn, “She believes that we're lengthy overdue for police reform on this nation and that we have to defund hundreds of thousands from the police so as to put crucial funding again into our social providers, schooling, and housing.”
Niou bid to signify the newly configured Decrease Manhattan-Brooklyn Home seat has earned endorsements from “Intercourse and the Metropolis” star and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, left-wing group New York Communities for Change and state Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Bushwick), amongst others.
In 2016, whereas vying to switch disgraced ex-Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, she recalled to the native outlet that two separate horrifying “incidents” drove her out of her condo on 106th Avenue and 1st Avenue in East Harlem.
In a single, she claimed she “watched a woman get raped on a pile of rubbish, proper throughout the road from the tasks,” the place she was residing. Within the different, the candidate stated she witnessed a person “slam a woman’s head … into an ATM machine” and rob her earlier than fleeing.
“We have now plenty of issues of safety,” Niou reportedly stated in April 2016. “A number of the issues that occur on the Decrease East Facet are very parallel, so these are all incidents that type of led to me shifting all the way down to the Monetary District and shifting in with my associate.”
Niou — who since 2017 has represented the sixty fifth District, which incorporates the Monetary District, Battery Park Metropolis, Chinatown, and the Decrease East Facet — was engaged on the time to David Segura, who based Large Media.
In an October 2012 report, Segura predicted the corporate would make $8 million in its third 12 months. The promoting know-how firm was offered in 2014 for an “undisclosed sum.”
Segura’s Instagram bio notes that he's an “Angel Investor in 60+ startups.”
Throughout their relationship, a number of photos Segura posted of the pair on Instagram present them main an opulent way of life. They embrace meals at a number of Michelin star eating places — the Trump Worldwide Lodge and Tower’s Jean-Georges, Gramercy Tavern, and Somtum Der, together with different advantageous eating spots.
Although it’s unclear when precisely the engagement was damaged off, sooner or later between October 26, 2016 and December 22 of that 12 months, the “About Yuh-Line” part of Niou’s web site was tweaked from “Yuh-Line lives on Broad Avenue together with her fiancé and their good-looking canine, Mr. Puds” to a model that eliminated “fiancé.”
Public data present that Segura in 2014 purchased a $2.6 million Wall Avenue condo the place Niou began residing earlier than her profitable 2016 bid, throughout which claimed she loaned her marketing campaign $50,000 of her financial savings whereas incomes $75,000 per 12 months as chief of employees to as state Assemblyman.
Assemblywoman Inez Dickens — who has represented components of Harlem within the Metropolis Council and Albany since 2006 — blasted Niou as “hypocritical” for leaving the realm on account of concern of crime earlier than advocating for stripping the NYPD of assets.
“You progress out of the neighborhood since you say it’s unsafe, you then say ‘defund the police?’ You flip round and desert the neighborhood — after which say you don’t want the police?” Dickens, a Democrat, fumed. “That’s hypocritical.”
“I didn’t depart my neighborhood, and there are occasions after I really feel unsafe,” she added.
Matt Thomas — a left-wing activist and author who isn't affiliated with a candidate within the packed main through which Niou is operating — was unsurprised that the Democratic lawmaker had expressed sentiments which can be antithetical to her extra lately professed ideological leanings.
“I feel it's commentary on the left’s unwillingness to confess that … folks’s considerations about public security are official, or on the very least they're pure responses to seeing crime on the streets, [and] issues like that,” he informed The Submit, including, “there appears to be an actual lack of willingness to confess that individuals don’t all the time have the wokest responses [to crime], and I feel that this can be a fairly amusing illustration of that.”
Thomas defined that the “defund the police” slogan has because the summer time 2020 George Floyd protests been quickly and “uncritically” adopted by progressive figures, so “there’s lots of people in that house whose mainly complete careers, historical past and public statements beforehand are very completely different from plenty of the issues that they’d been saying since summer time 2020.”
“What’s humorous is how aggressively Yuh-Line and others in that house try to self-discipline folks for transgressions in opposition to woke propriety, when on the identical time, they've plenty of the identical breaches of that propriety of their very current pasts,” Thomas added.
A rep for Niou declined to remark.
Extra lately, Niou, 38, has discovered herself in scorching water over statements relating to police.
Earlier this 12 months, the state legislator confronted backlash for calling a big group of cops coming into a subway station following a funeral for slain NYPD Officer Jason Rivera a “horrifying present of intimidation,” and liking a tweet evaluating the throng of officers to Nazis.
Months later, The Submit reported that the left-wing lawmaker made daring claims of delivering COVID-19 pandemic assist and “saving lives,” however had exaggerated the extent of her efforts.
In Could, The Submit reported that Niou — who was born in Taiwan and moved to america at a younger age — had repeatedly falsely asserted that the Empire State’s funds funding and language fully omitted Asian Individuals till she got here to Albany.
Niou will in two months face a crowded discipline of contenders in New York’s tenth Congressional District, which spans from Decrease Manhattan into Park Slope and close by Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Candidates within the Aug. 23 Democratic main embrace ex-Mayor Invoice de Blasio, U.S. Rep. Mondaire Jones of the Hudson Valley, Councilwoman Carlina Rivera of the East Village, together with head lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Daniel Goldman.
Extra reporting by Carl Campanile
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