The girlfriend of murdered social justice advocate Ryan Carson is calling on GOP Council member Vickie Paladino to publicly apologize for tweeting “demonstrably false” statements that she tried to hinder the killer’s prosecution because of her politics.
Claudia Morales is also asking City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to take disciplinary action against Paladino for her “misuse of elected office to defame a private citizen for political gain.”
Carson, 32, and Morales were sitting on a bench near Malcolm X Blvd. near Lafayette Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Oct. 2, 2023, when Brian Dowling, then 18, stabbed Carson to death in an unprovoked, caught-on-video attack.
“This is the first time that Council member Paladino and I have interacted,” Morales, 30, told the Daily News Wednesday. “So when I saw her tweet come in when I was going through my phone that morning, I was very rattled, upset. I felt very violated. And my first thought was to respond and correct her lies about me.”
Paladino took to X, formerly Twitter, after Morales posted photos of herself Saturday with Democrat mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani and wrote, “a girl and her mayor.”
“So we’re clear, this woman is a DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] activist who watched her fellow activist boyfriend get brutally stabbed to death on a Brooklyn sidewalk and didn’t immediately call the police because the murderer was nonwhite and her politics are the real evil,” Paladino wrote in a now-deleted post on X. “She also failed to pick out the murderer in a police lineup, likely on purpose to hinder the prosecution and ensure the murderer walked free.”
The murderer did not, in fact, walk free.
Dowling was sentenced to 20 years to life in February, at a proceeding where Morales gave a victim impact statement.
When Morales pointed out that she called 911 immediately, “cooperated with the case every step of the way,” and testified before the grand jury, Paladino replied, “But to be clear, you’re a police and prison abolitionist, and ideally according to your ideology you’d want the murderer to not have been arrested or imprisoned.”
Paladino responded to criticism from other X users with another post: “She made herself a public figure and uses the event as a springboard for her politics. She’s a DSA celebrity specifically because of this. If she’s going to politicize the murder of her boyfriend, then the street goes both ways.”
On Wednesday, Morales sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paladino demanding an apology.
“Your misuse of elected office to defame a private citizen for political gain has forced Ms. Morales to seek legal representation, and we are formally demanding that you cease and desist all such communications concerning our client and issue a public apology for your defamatory statements,” attorney Maryanne K. Kaishian wrote.
“Your conduct has caused Ms. Morales to suffer significant harm and has further ignited a wave of vile online harassment and threats that put Ms. Morales and her loved ones’ safety at risk. You were well-aware of these readily foreseeable outcomes and the clear falsity of your claims when you made them.”
Rendy Desamours, a spokesperson for the the Council speaker, said Adams doesn’t alone have the authority to discipline members, but that she has referred the matter to the Council’s Committee on Standard and Ethics, which does have jurisdiction.
“Speaker Adams finds Council member Paladino’s recent comments on social media, as well as others over the past years, to be disgusting and offensive,” Desamours said.
Paladino could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Morales said she’s gotten abuse and harassment online after the murder, particularly after media accounts mischaracterized how she was unable to initially pick Dowling’s face out of a photo array in the early hours of the investigation.
But Paladino’s tweets marked the first time an elected official came after her, she said, adding that the Council member’s position lends legitimacy to and amplifies the misinformation spread about her.
It also adds to a “climate where harassing defaming and smearing a victim of violent crime, or any other private citizen, just because they happen to disagree with you politically is not just permissible, but righteous,” she said.
“This was very re-traumatizing, what she did to me, what she posted,” Morales said. “It’s newly unsettling and scary because it came from an elected official, and it’s because it’s so local.”
Carson was a rising star at the New York Public Interest Research Group, where he worked as a public policy campaign manager.
Morales said she plans to stay on X, formerly known as Twitter, in part because she’s used it since she was a teenager, and in part because she met Carson on the social media platform.
“I just refuse to be run off of a platform that has given me so much,” she said, “because other people have decided that they want to erase me from it.”
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