Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, believes he could have been gravely “killed” when a supermarket employee slapped him on the back on Sunday in Staten Island as he was supporting his son Andrew, who is running for governor.
Giuliani declared in a Facebook video that “his intent was to cause serious harm.” “I could have fallen and cracked my skull and died.”
At half-past three in the afternoon, Giuliani, formerly known as America’s Mayor, was shaking hands and handing out fliers at the ShopRite on Veterans Road when a store employee named Daniel Gill, 39, gave him a tap on the back and said, “What’s up, scumbag?”
The former mayor claimed that when the man approached him, he had just exited the restroom and was standing with a group of supporters.
‘All of the sudden, I feel this ‘Bam!’ on my back,’ Giuliani told the New York Post. ‘I don’t know if they helped me not fall down, but I just about fell down.’
According to police, Gill was charged with second-degree assault, a felony, but prosecutors eventually reduced the charges to misdemeanor assault and other misdemeanors, according to the New York Daily News.
He was arraigned and released without bail on Monday afternoon.
‘The charges facing Daniel Gill, who has no previous contact with the criminal legal system, are inconsistent with existing law,’ Legal Aid Society spokesman Redmond Haskins said in a statement. ‘Our client merely patted Mr. Giuliani, who sustained nothing remotely resembling physical injuries, without malice to simply get his attention, as the video footage clearly showed.’
Legal Aid says that it was Giuliani’s crew who was harassing Gill, when one of the ex-mayor’s entourage followed the grocery store worker, poked him in the chest and told him the was going to be ‘locked up.’
‘Given Mr. Giuliani’s obsession with seeing his name in the press and his demonstrated propensity to distort the truth, we are happy to correct the record on exactly what occurred over the weekend on Staten Island,’ Haskins said.
On Facebook, in recounting the interaction, the former mayor, who was credited with cleaning up crime in New York City in the 1990s, said he felt like he was hit with a ‘boulder.’
‘It knocked me forward a step or two,’ he said. ‘It didn’t knock me down, but it hurt tremendously. I didn’t know what it was.’
Video of the incident shows the man approach Giuliani from behind and firmly tap the former mayor’s back as he walks by.
Giuliani doesn’t appear to stagger, but a woman standing next to him gently rubs his back as they both turn toward the supermarket worker.
‘You, you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women,’ ‘ Giuliani said Gill told him. ‘You and your f–king friend are gonna kill women.’
Giuliani, who also worked as a lawyer for the 2020 Trump presidential campaign in trying unsuccessfully to over turn the election amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, said the woman standing next to him touched his back, ‘felt it and massaged it.’
‘He hit him so hard that, I felt it,’ Rita Rugova, an eyewitness, told the MailOnline.
Rugova said she was about to ask for Giuliani’s photo when Gill stormed passed.
‘He’s a senior citizen,’ she said. ‘No matter what your political views are, no one should be hit.’
A retired first-grade detective who was standing there when it happened didn’t initially make any moves to arrest Gill, who continued to berate Giuliani about his stance on abortion.
‘He kept cursing and menacing,’ Giuliani said, recalling how he turned to the detective and said ‘Let’s get him arrested. Let’s make an example out of him.’
Giuliani said he has an appointment on Monday to see his doctor about the injury but declined medical attention at the scene.
The store employee seemed to be venting his anger about the US Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade on Friday, which rendered the right to an abortion unconstitutional.