A newspaper reporter in London thought they were reaching out to former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for an interview about Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The person they actually contacted was Bill DeBlasio, a wine importer from Huntington, Long Island.
Instead of correcting the reporter’s mistake, DeBlasio decided to have some fun.
“I never said I was the mayor”
It was DeBlasio’s email address, bearing his full name, that got his opinion of Mamdani onto the pages of The Times of London.
A reporter reached out via email, and the wine importer light-heartedly obliged, sharing some criticisms of Mamdani.
“I never said I was the mayor. He sent it to ‘Mr. de Blasio’ and I replied as ‘Bill DeBlasio,'” DeBlasio said. “I spelled my name properly, no small D, you know. The big D, you know. The way my grandparents told us we were supposed to spell our name.”
The paper said they retracted the story “after discovering that our reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.”
“I just can’t believe that, you know, I hate to call them lazy, but, like, they didn’t check, and he didn’t address me as mayor,” DeBlasio said. “It was a little bit of sloppy reporting, you know, obviously they didn’t vet me out. I never thought it would make it that far.”
“It literally was a surreal feeling”
The man truly surprised by the interview was de Blasio, a major Mamdani supporter.
“This is what’s so weird — I have people still reaching out to me saying, ‘Oh, I see you changed your mind.’ I’m like, no, I never did. It literally was a surreal feeling,” de Blasio said. “I’m looking at a headline. I’m looking at a quote. A newspaper I never spoke to, a journalist I never contacted.”
DeBlasio said the mix-up is nothing new.
“It’s been brutal having the same name as the ex-mayor, especially an unpopular one,” DeBlasio said. “It’s been entertaining. I think I’ve handled it with humor and had some fun with it over the years.”
He says he’s learned to play along.
“I’ve been to, like, charity golf outings, and it was a bunch of firemen and cops, and they were like, ‘oh, longest drive, Bill DeBlasio,’ and I’ve been booed. You know, they’d start booing,” he said.
The former mayor and the wine importer actually once met at a Mets game.
“He says to me, he goes, ‘So how bad is it having the same name as me?’ And I said, ‘Dude, you’re f—— killing me,'” DeBlasio said. “And he paused for, like, a second, like he was taken aback, he didn’t know what to say. And then he just looked at me and he put his hand on my shoulder. He goes, ‘I’m so sorry.'”
But confusion has its perks.
“You could call any restaurant in Manhattan and say, I’m making a reservation for, you know, Bill DeBlasio. And sometimes they’d say to my wife, ‘Are you calling from the mayor’s office?’ And my wife would just say, ‘I’d rather not say,'” DeBlasio said. “A couple times, I had to show my driver’s license to show that I was Bill DeBlasio.”
DeBlasio points out he had the name first. The former mayor was born Warren Wilhelm Jr. and later changed it.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: cbsnews.com
