New York City Mayor Eric Adams is denying a claim that he fired a gun in school as a child, despite the account being included in his book “Don’t Let It Happen.”
“I pointed what I thought was a toy gun at my group of friends and pulled the trigger,” the passage reads.
“A round discharged, and only by the grace of God and my poor aim did the bullet miss my friends. The incident scared me so much that I dropped the gun and ran.”
However, the mayor said at a Monday press conference that the incident never happened.
“I never fired a gun in school,” he said. “The co-author of the book may have misunderstood” an incident “where someone pointed what they thought was a toy gun,” he added.
Mr. Adams then said the book “never got into print because it never went through the proof-reading aspect of it.”
“Don’t Let It Happen,” which lists only Mr. Adams as an author, was published in August 2009 by Xulon Press, a company that specializes in self-published Christian titles and is owned by Salem Media Group, a powerful conservative publisher.
The mayor’s office says they are working to remove the book from circulation due to the allegedly inaccurate passage.
A City Hall spokesperson said after the press conference that the mayor had never reviewed the final version of the book and only just learned it was publicly available.
“The mayor has already contacted the publisher, who is working to take the book out of circulation,” the spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said in an email. He said the mayor had worked on the book with a ghostwriter, who he declined to name.
Raised by a single mother in South Jamaica, Queens, Mr. Adams has frequently touted his working class roots, recently telling constituents that he would pray for snow as a child so he would have something to drink when his home’s water was turned off.
But some of the personal stories, which are often difficult to verify, have drawn scrutiny. He has admitted to The New York Times that a confrontation he claimed to have had with a neighbor, which he recounted in a 2019 commencement address, actually happened to someone else. And he has faced questions about minor changes he has made to an oft-repeated story about being beaten up by police as a child.
“Don’t Let It Happen” was published when Mr. Adams was a state senator representing Brooklyn. It includes a colorful cover featuring a revolver in a pink lunchbox, as well as a forward credited to Mr. Adams’s longtime domestic partner, Tracey Collins.
In the introduction, the author provides readers with an assurance: “All of the incidents in this book are true.”
