Sandy MaloneStaten Island, NY – Police have arrested a New York grocery store employee who slapped 78-year-old former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the back and called him obscene names on Sunday while the septuagenarian was campaigning for his son’s gubernatorial bid.
The incident occurred just before 3:30 p.m. on June 26 in a ShopRite grocery store located in Staten Island, the New York Post reported.
Giuliani had just exited the restroom and was chatting with a group of his son Andrew’s supporters when he felt something hit him from behind.
“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.”
Surveillance video from inside ShopRite showed a person approached the former mayor from behind and delivered a slap to his back, then kept going.
“I feel this tremendous pain in my back, and I’m thinking, what the — I didn’t even know what it was,” he explained to the New York Post. “All of a sudden, I hear this guy say, ‘You’re a f–king scumbag,’ then he moves away so nobody can grab him.”
The former mayor of the Big Apple said his attacker was yelling about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“And he says, ‘You, you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women,’” Giuliani recalled. “‘You and your f–king friend are gonna kill women.’ Then he starts yelling out all kinds of, just curses, and every once in a while, he puts in that woman thing.”
“‘You guys think you’re saving babies, but you’re gonna kill women,’” the employee reportedly raged at the attorney who was most recently part of the team that represented former President Donald Trump in his challenge to the 2020 election results.
Giuliani called in to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa’s radio show on WABC and told him about what had happened, the New York Post reported.
He told Sliwa the slap felt like “somebody shot me.”
“Luckily, I’m a 78 year old who is in pretty good shape,” the former mayor added. “If I wasn’t, I would have hit the ground and probably cracked my skull.”
Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and a legendarily tough-on-crime former city leader, said he felt it was his duty to call the police about the grocery store incident, the New York Post reported.
“I say to myself, ‘You know something? I gotta get this guy arrested,’” he explained. “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,” Giuliani said. “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.”
Witnesses said the attack on the former mayor credited with cleaning up the city and getting the city’s first responders through the aftermath of 9/11 was shocking, the New York Post reported.
“I was shoulder-to-shoulder with Rudy inside ShopRite,” Rita Rugova-Johnson said. “We’re talking, and all of a sudden an employee came out of nowhere and open-handedly slapped him in the back and said, ‘Hey, what’s up, scumbag?’”
“[The attacker] was on duty at the time,” Rugova-Johnson said. “The cops arrested him.”
Police arrested 39-year-old Daniel Gil inside the store, the New York Post reported.
Sources said Gil with charged with second-degree assault involving a person over age 65.
Giuliani did not seek medical attention for any injuries he may have sustained in the attack, the New York Post reported.
Watch the incident unfold in the video below:
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
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