Vickie Paladino charged by ethics committee

The New York City Council’s standards and ethics committee voted Monday to charge Council Member Vickie Paladino for Islamophobic remarks she’s made on social media over the past few months.

The disciplinary process remains in motion. Jack Lobel, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Julie Menin, said that the council’s Committee on Rules, Privileges, Elections, Standards and Ethics specifically charged Paladino with “engaging in disorderly behavior and violating the council’s anti-harassment and discrimination policy.” 

The firebrand Queens Republican will now have five days to provide a written response. From there, she’ll be scheduled to appear before the committee in a closed door, executive session in the coming weeks to continue disciplinary proceedings. It’s not immediately clear what sort of tangible consequences may be brought against Paladino upon the conclusion of the process. 

The council’s disciplinary process is largely carried out by the nine member standards and ethics committee, which has the power to recommend sanctions like censure, fines or most seriously, expulsion. Any final verdict would ultimately need to be approved by two-thirds of the 51-member City Council.

Paladino argued last week the City Council couldn’t punish her, after Menin said she had directed the standards and ethics committee to address Paladino’s comments. “As an elected official and an American, have an absolute first amendment right to speak on these matters of public policy in any way I see fit. Period,” Paladino said in a lengthy defense on X. 

On Tuesday evening, Paladino responded to a tweet sharing this story and once again defended her posts. Describing the committee’s ruling as “a mockery of the first amendment,” she said her legal team would respond “to this egregious violation” of her rights. “The fact that this egregious disregard for the Constitution was allowed to proceed to this point is a stain on our Council, and on New York City,” she wrote in a post on X. “Actions like this are meant to intimidate both elected officials and individuals against speaking their conscious (sic) on matters of public import and controversy, and the chilling effect on speech is undeniable.”

The ruling comes in wake of the committee’s vote in December to look into Paladino’s social media conduct after she posted a string of Islamophobic rhetoric on her X account, including one that said Muslims should be expelled from Western nations. While the posts drew a wave of criticism from her fellow council members, Muslim groups and other elected officials, Paladino has repeatedly doubled down on the remarks, claiming she has a right to free speech. She’s continued firing off other controversial tweets that have drawn outcry, including one describing a photo of Mayor Zohran Mamdani praying with Muslim sanitation workers as “part of Islamic conquest” and about “dismantling the country as it was founded.”

Paladino is known for her provocative, often offensive rhetoric on social media. And she’s had a long history of generating controversy. In June, she used her account to call for the deportation of Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Uganda. While former Speaker Adrienne Adams booted her from the City Council’s Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction in 2023 for disparaging comments she made against the LGBTQ+ community, and later knocked her down to six committee placements, she has never been formally censured. At least not yet. The standards and ethics committee’s latest vote is the furthest formal disciplinary action has been taken against her.

There’s some precedent for the committee censuring council members, but most investigations have involved other alleged ethical misconduct instead of offensive speech. Then-Council Member Andy King for example was censured in 2019 after the committee concluded that he’d harassed a female staffer, retaliated against whistleblowers and misused taxpayer funds. (King was later expelled from the council). Members have been reprimanded for speech before, however, but not by the standards and ethics committee. Former City Council Member Rubén Díaz Sr. was stripped from chairing a committee overseeing for-hire vehicles in 2019 for homophobic comments, and former City Council Member Kalman Yeger was removed from the immigration committee during a broader restructuring of committee assignments for saying Palestine doesn’t exist.

After getting elected speaker in January, Menin said she only assigned Paladino to two committees, which she attributed to Paladino’s conduct on social media. The Republican council member claimed that she’d only wanted to serve on the two committees, but later bashed the speaker in a radio interview for calling her out in front of the press. Menin for her part has said the council needs a “far stronger” standards and ethics committee, and promised to make that a priority, along with strengthening the body’s harassment policy.

“I think there was immense frustration in the past four years that certain conduct was just accepted and there seemed to be no consequence,” she told City & State in an interview earlier this year.