Former New York City Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was slapped on the back Sunday at a Staten Island grocery store by a worker who has since been arrested and charged with second-degree assault.
The 78-year-old was out and about in the conservative-leaning New York City borough campaigning for his son, Andrew Giuliani, who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor, when the incident occurred. Surveillance footage obtained by the New York Post showed “America’s mayor” talking to a small group of shoppers at a local ShopRite when a store worker came from behind and slapped him. Giuliani was then grabbed by a woman to his left, who he said may have prevented him from falling forward.
The worker, who police have yet to name, then began heckling the famous Republican about abortion, a major national topic in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade on Friday.
ZELDIN LEADS TOPSY-TURVY NY GOP RACE OVER GIULIANI
“All of a sudden, I feel this, ‘Bam!’ on my back,” Giuliani said. “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 continued. “All of a sudden, I hear this guy say, ‘You’re a f**king scumbag,’ then he moves away so nobody can grab him.”
WATCH Former New York City Mayor @RudyGiuliani, now 78, claimed he was assaulted by a 39-year-old Staten Island supermarket employee who exchanged words with him. pic.twitter.com/jCC01RcG7Y
— BNN Newsroom (@BNNBreaking) June 26, 2022
He went on to quote the assailant as saying to him “You, you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women. You and your f***ing friend are gonna kill women.”
In a separate interview with the New York Times, the former federal prosecutor decried the recent rise in political violence, telling the outlet: “This has to stop. This is getting ridiculous. I’ve been in politics 50 years, I’ve never been attacked like this.”
As a result, he told the New York Post, he felt an obligation to call police on the man.
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“I say to myself, ‘You know something? I gotta get this guy arrested,’” he told the outlet. “I talk about ‘broken windows’ theory all the time. You can’t let the little things go.”
“I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get this guy arrested as an example that you can’t do this.’ And I said, also, in New York, we don’t prosecute people anymore And one of the reasons I brought crime down is I didn’t ignore stuff like this.”
Giuliani’s son, who faces a tough primary fight against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) for the GOP nomination, was not present when his father was slapped. The gubernatorial hopeful said his father was “doing fine, but it’s a sad day when New Yorkers’ greatest crime fighter, ‘America’s Mayor,’ is attacked.”
