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Even well-seasoned reporters who’ve seen it all at City Hall were stunned the other day when Mayor Eric Adams took shots at a Daily News reporter who ran a story about a new book written by ex-girlfriend Jasmine Ray. In the tell-all tome, called “Political Humanity,” Ray alluded to a sexual encounter with Adams in Borough Hall in Brooklyn. The charge led to Adams calling the reporter “sick and dark” and holding a vendetta against him. Chris Sommerfeldt is the Senior City Hall reporter for the New York Daily News whose article was at the center of the kerfuffle. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to express his surprise at the mayor’s sudden rage against the media machine.
Sommerfeldt recalled his version of what led up to the fight with the mayor for host Larry Mendte: “[It was] a little bit uncomfortable; I, at the same time, tried to focus in that moment on doing my job and asked the mayor a follow-up question. So, as he started railing against me and calling me sick and dark, I tried to get him to clarify exactly what happened in his office in Borough Hall. I’m not sure in that office; we stand by our reporting… Something clearly happened in that office; we stand by our reporting on what that exactly was, but since the mayor started denying it at a public press conference, I tried to get him to clarify it- he did not want to.”
Sommerfeldt doesn’t want to think that Adams singled him out as a flash point after four years of a tarnished image in the media: “I will say the mayor has been very bitter about media coverage of his administration for quite some time… I just know that ever since he was indicted on corruption charges last fall, he’s been very, very angry about the ways on which the indictment, the fallout from it, and everything that came with it was portrayed in the media.”
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