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NJ Mayor Suddenly Blames His Naked Photos On "Hispanic Girls" Doing "Filthy" Things
By
Jen Chung
Published May 6, 2013
Modified May 6, 2013
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via his campaign website
By
Jen Chung
Published May 6, 2013
Modified May 6, 2013
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Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy is no stranger to weirdness—he was convicted for scuffling with police in 2007—but an incident from his 2004 days as a city councilman is being revisited because of a Star-Ledger column published yesterday: "This is a guy who was photographed naked on his front porch at 2 a.m. during the 2004 campaign, and won the race anyway."
In 2004, the NY Times reported, "Mr. Healy, a diabetic, said that photographs showing him naked were the result of a night out drinking six to eight beers over a three-hour period—though he is still scratching his head and wondering how he ended up on the porch. 'I wish I recall how I got back out there,' he said. 'But I don't.'"
Suddenly, nine years later and facing re-election, Healy spoke to Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran:
Last week he offered a new version of the story with a bizarre sexual twist. Now he says three young women woke him by banging trash cans outside his house, so he rose from bed, wrapped a towel around himself, and went to investigate.
Take the naked photo incident. At the time, Healy acknowledged he had been drinking and said he could not remember what happened. “Three Hispanic girls, young kids,” he says. “So I go out on the porch and they pulled the towel off me. Now I start laughing, and then they started doing other stuff. I said, ‘I’m old enough to be your grandfather.’ ”
What other stuff? “It was filthy,” he says. “I chased them away, and I just sat down.”
And that, he says, is when a political enemy snapped the photograph. Why he would be changing this story now, in the final stretch of the campaign, is anyone’s guess.
His rival, Councilman Steven Fulop, told the Star-Ledger, "It's another embarrassment in a statewide newspaper courtesy of Jerry Healy and it's sad that 10 years after the fact, he now decides to blame Hispanic women for his personal problems."
Councilwoman Nidia Lopez said, "I think the Hispanic community deserves an apology and I think our mayor needs psychological help ... For this mayor to degrade Hispanic women by creating this wild story eight years later ... three young kids molested him, he's laughing about it. How the hell did he know they were Hispanic?" She added, "When I ran in 2009, I asked him if that was really him on the stoop, and he said, 'I don't know baby. I was so drunk I don't remember.' Those were his exact words to me .... There is absolutely something wrong with this picture."
Tagged
hispanic
jerramiah healy
jersey city
naked photos
weird
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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