No one was quite sure where Brooklyn’s democratic socialist state senate candidate Julia Salazar was headed when she hurried from a rally in her district early Saturday afternoon. It was just five days before her Sept. 13 primary, and a crowd of hyped-up canvassers was gearing up to knock on doors around the neighborhood.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warmed up the crowd for Salazar’s milder presence then she took the stage and surveyed her chanting supporters with a low-pitched, “Wow” into the mic. Though they were clearly happy to see her, the controversies that have surrounded Salazar recently seemed to hang in the air. “We will not be distracted, and we will not be divided,” she said, repeating the insistent refrain that, We are unified. She hugged gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon and attorney general hopeful Zephyr Teachout—and then swiftly fled, with two reporters briefly on her tail, to an undisclosed location. Organizers, acting as bodyguards in the moment, could only guess where to. Working Families Party staffers Joe Dinkin and Monica Klein formed a barrier between her and reporters. “I really don’t know where she went,” Dinkin said of the candidate who’d just left her own canvassing event, on the last weekend before the election.
To be fair, shrinking from mounting media scrutiny has become a key part of Salazar’s strategy since last month, when scandal first encircled her campaign, which would otherwise be a strictly local story. A late August expose in Tablet magazine, “Who Is Julia Salazar?,” raised questions about the reality of her purported identity: She sold herself to voters as a Jewish Latina, a recent Columbia graduate, an immigrant with working class roots. Friends, family, and public records render this version of her biography at best misleading. “We were very much middle class,” her brother Alex told City & State, “I feel very strongly about my family and I want to tell the truth.” Previously sympathetic outlets have had to cover the ensuing scandal, while critics continue to convey the reasonable deduction that Salazar has a strained relationship with the truth.
It only got weirder from there: The Daily Mail last week reported a bizarre connection between Salazar and former Met Keith Hernandez. She admitted to an affair with the retired ballplayer—her neighbor and family friend in Jupiter, Florida—and was arrested in 2011 for impersonating his now ex-wife Kai, for whom she was house-sitting at the time, in calls to her bank. After the arrest, Salazar sued Kai Hernandez, claiming that the recordings of her impersonating Hernandez were actually Hernandez impersonating her impersonating Hernandez. Before the two women settled out of court—”My client had cancer, and just wanted it over,” Hernandez’s Florida-based lawyer Lynne Ventry told THE WEEKLY STANDARD in a recent phone interview—Salazar said she’d had affair with Keith Hernandez, which gave his wife motive to set her up as she was then claiming. (Today, Salazar denies the affair.) “She claimed Kai was disguising her voice to sound like Julia because she was angry at Julia—which made no sense, because she had Julia house-sitting for her!” Ventry said. “I’m surprised as anybody that she’s running for office. Her story was bizarre.” Tablet published the bank’s recordings of the calls in a subsequent article: It sounds a lot like Salazar.
The Democratic Socialist party line on Saturday, meanwhile, was that this is all fake news—a coordinated media conspiracy launched against her by a fearful centrist establishment desperate to protect real estate interests in the district, which spans parts of Brooklyn and Queens, and threatened by the ascent of a pro-BDS Democrat. Salazar, who identified as a conservative Christian and then an anti-Israel Jew while at Columbia, later cut her teeth as a community activist with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.
Nomiki Konst of the progressive super-PAC Our Revolution—an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign—dismissed the stories about Salazar’s lies as a conspiracy. “Silly stuff,” was what she called these articles in a conversation with TWS, echoing Salazar’s own statement in which she paints herself as a victim. “Are they gonna attack her? And is she the victim of those attacks? Absolutely,” Konst said, “It’s completely gendered and disgusting.”
A spokeswoman from Cynthia Nixon’s campaign was more circumspect. “Her people are handling it. We leave it up to them,” she told me of the Salazar campaign, shortly after its candidate had fled with two handlers. When I asked how the Nixon campaign was fielding questions about the stories swirling around Salazar, she said simply that, “She’s better than the alternative.”
Lyndon Hernandez, who was preparing to canvass for Salazar, told me that if anyone asked him, that’s just what he’d say. “I mean, just look at the other guy!” Hernandez said, thinking of eight-term incumbent Democrat Martin Malave Dilan, who’s fought off a DSA-backed challenger twice before. The Keith Hernandez rumors may well be true, said another Salazar canvasser, 31-year-old Martin Gantt, with a Seinfeldian glint—but there, he was prepared to tell constituents, the Sunshine State’s reputation for weird news was at fault: “That’s a matter for the state of Florida, man. You can’t blame someone for living in Florida and being sucked into that bullshit.” He also had an answer for the biographical discrepancies Tablet and others had unearthed, if anyone asked: “Her positions as an undergrad college student are pretty trivial,” he said.
It didn’t seem so trivial at the time, according to an ex-friend from Salazar’s Columbia days who talked to TWS on the condition that his name be withheld. When she came back to campus in 2013 and told him she’d left Christianity and conservatism, after having held leading roles in the right-to-life and Christian apologetics groups on campus, he was worried. “The fact that it seemed to happen so abruptly and there was a lack of self-awareness worried me as well,” he added. She told him that her father’s family were Sephardi Jews, he recalled, and that she was “raised in a secular Jewish environment”—but converted to Christianity in high school, after reading C.S. Lewis. “In light of all that’s come out, I have a hard time believing I ever had a sense of her character,” despite their having worked closely with her hosting religious events, he said. “I wouldn’t want to to overstate how calculated it seems. I suspect self-deception, and genuine transformation,” he qualified, adding that, “It’s more socially rewarding to be a flag-waving anti-Zionist socialist than a conservative on campus.”
Tellingly perhaps, her strongest and most defensive supporters—according to Patrick Seaman, 21, a journalism student at NYU, who was also in attendance at Saturday’s rally—come from the college-age ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America, who held another rally for her the following night on NYU’s campus. “NYU DSA sticks by her pretty heavy. They really rally behind her, but few of them live in her district,” Seaman said of his classmates at NYU’s Greenwich Village campus, “And they don’t know how working people live.” Neither, of course, does Julia Salazar, according to her mother and brother who’ve strongly denied her public descriptions of the manner in which she grew up.
Her misrepresentations won’t matter in this district, though, according to one woman canvassing for the candidates, who handed me a local councilman and candidate for lieutenant governor’s business card—and then told me why Salazar would win. “There is a media conspiracy against her,” the woman said, but no one will care what it digs up. “There’s nothing she can do, outside of like punching a midget baby,” she said—nothing she can do to alienate her supporters in this district, that is.
Councilman Brad Lander, also of Brooklyn, wasn’t quite so sanguine about Salazar’s safety. “They definitely like her here,” he allowed, “There’s lots of pieces to it, though. Obviously people’s prurient curiosity about the Hernandez thing is probably driven by whatever it is about us as human beings that makes us interested in salacious stuff.”
Salazar’s web of lies is not so simple, in other words. And it’s not the sort of story that will die easily. Whether the truth will catch up with her in time to bear consequences on primary day remains to be seen—but with just three days to go before Brooklynites head to the polls, we’ll find out soon enough.
