Rodneyse Bichotte’s Misleading Endorsement Claim

The Daily News is reporting that Rodneyse Bichotte has mislead the public into believing she received an endorsement from Councilman Jumaane Williams for State Assembly.

“I’m pretty upset,” Williams said. “That’s just not an accurate mailer. It was done without me knowing about it.”

Williams said he did endorse Bichotte in a separate race for district leader, but left no question that he would not take sides in the Assembly race.

“I was clear about that,” he said. “It’s just completely unacceptable, completely without my input at all.”

Here is the mailer that the News and Williams himself says led readers to believe she was endorsed by Williams for Assembly over her opponent, incumbent Rhoda Jacobs.

Just yesterday, our profile of Rodneyse initially said that she was endorsed by Williams for the Assembly because Ms. Bichotte’s campaign sent out mailers with headlines such as this:

We corrected the piece immediately once we realized that Williams had not endorsed Bichotte for Assembly but for District Leader. We think you’ll see why it was an extremely easy mistake to make. The headline lists Williams along with those who endorsed Bichotte for Assembly, making no effort to differentiate between the two different categories of endorsements. At the time, we thought it misleading by Bichotte’s campaign and began calling other endorsements claimed by Bichotte (such as Senator Parker) to confirm. We have heard nothing back yet.

In our interview with the candidate, Bichotte said the belligerent phone calls voters recieved from callers claiming to be from the Jacobs campaign are a result of Jacobs being disconnected from her campaign and not having control over who’s calling people. Bichotte’s own literature suggests a problem of control that is, at the very least, just as serious. At worst, the campaign has intentionally misled the public.

Our own Avi Glickstein interviewed Bichotte and wrote the profile in question.

“When I (mistakenly) asked her about the fact that she’d been endorsed by Jumaane Williams but not yet Mathieu Eugene, she didn’t correct me,” writes Avi.

Williams’ own emails on the subject were headlined “PRESS RELEASE: JUMAANE WILLIAMS ENDORSES RODNEYSE BICHOTTE.” While that is not particularly clear, the very next sentence explicitly states that he was endorsing Williams “for female district leader of the 42nd Assembly District.”

Bichotte’s campaign staff says that the mailer the Daily News has was a “typo”. How will they explain the wording of the emails? We reached out to Bichotte’s campaign by phone and email but have heard nothing back yet.