City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, a Republican representing parts of Queens, is suing the New York City Council — asking a state judge to step in to block an upcoming hearing where she would have to defend herself against a committee’s charge of disorderly conduct related to a series of virulently anti-Muslim tweets she fired off from her personal account.
In a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court Monday by attorney Jim Walden, who ran an unsuccessful independent campaign for mayor against now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Paladino asked a judge to “enjoin an unprecedented and unconstitutional act of legislative overreach.”
“The City Council cannot police the private speech of its members, especially not selectively. This is a case involving misuse of power,” Walden said of the lawsuit. “If permitted, the power can and will be misused by both political parties. Courts need to stop this trend dead in its tracks.”
A State Supreme Court judge denied Paladino’s request for a temporary restraining order but set up a hearing for early April to decide the matter ahead of the planned ethics hearing before the council next month, Walden told THE CITY after the appearance Monday.
The suit follows the council’s Committee on Rules, Privileges, Elections, Standards and Ethics vote earlier this month to charge Paladino for her tweets that followed Mamdani’s historic election victory as the first Muslim elected to city mayor and immediately after a terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
In a now deleted tweet last December, Paladino called for the “expulsion of Muslims from western nations” calling on the Trump administration to come up with a “legal framework for the denaturalization process and get it over with before we end up with another 9/11 or worse.”
She later railed about “Islamic conquest” of New York City when Mamdani tweeted a photo of sanitation workers praying before they started snow plowing.
On another occasion, she wrote that “affiliation with a terrorist group sure seems like a prerequisite for employment with Zohran’s administration.”
In January, new Council Speaker Julie Menin removed Paladino from five of the seven committees she’d previously served on and referred the matter to the rules and ethics committee, noting that they were part of a pattern of such tweets, which have often been written by Palladino’s 48-year-old son Thomas Palladino, Jr., an ardent Trump supporter.
At the time Menin called the rhetoric “abhorrent and is unacceptable,” and said there were “numerous — too many to count” examples of it.
In her lawsuit, Paladino argues she’s being subjected to disparate treatment because of her conservative political views, and argues she tweeted the remarks from her personal account and outside of work hours.
The lawsuit comes two days after right-wing influencer Jake Lang rallied with a few dozen supporters outside Gracie Mansion to “Stop Islamic takeover of New York City.” He was met by about 150 counter-protesters at an event where two people were arrested after trying to set off bombs in what NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “being investigated as an act of ISIS-inspired terrorism.”
“On the streets we have bombs thrown at us by Islamic extremists. And in City Hall we face unconstitutional ethics charges by the spineless politicians who cower to them,” Paladino tweeted Monday, connecting her own situation to the attempted attack at Gracie over the weekend.
The two men arrested are facing federal criminal charges and are expected to be arraigned in federal court on Monday.
Without judicial intervention, Paladino faces a hearing before the council’s ethics committee after which the committee could recommend she be fined, censured or ejected from the council, which the full council would then have to vote on.
Jack Lobel, a spokesperson for the council, declined to comment, noting the lawsuit and the ethics committee hearing were both pending. A spokesperson for Mamdani didn’t return a request for comment right away.
Justin Harrison, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that while the First Amendment protects people’s right to free expression, “workplaces can still reprimand employees for violating internal rules,” he said.
“It’s well within a legislature’s rights to publicly censure, criticize, or reprimand a lawmaker, as long as it doesn’t materially harm that individual’s ability to function as a legislator,” he said.
