Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned from her post as NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s director of appointments. The Anti-Defamation League dug up comments she made as a teenager that registered as anti-Semitic; this happened just a day after Mamdani announced her appointment. Da Costa, 33 (above) is married to a deputy city comptroller, and he is, ironically enough, Jewish. When she authored the social media posts in question, however, she wasn’t married and couldn’t imagine that her dumb posts would come back to sideline her career.
“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using the abbreviation for “shaking my head.” “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote in another post. “I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said in her resignation statement. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”
Long-time readers here may remember Ethics Alarms posts about the “Hader Gotcha,” named for a young Major League Baseball pitcher of note (he’s still pretty good) who was forced to grovel an abject apology for tweeting offensive things when he was in high school that almost nobody read. I wrote in one of the early EA posts on the phenomenon,
“I’ve written about this new blight on the American scene three times since a creep trying to embarrass Milwaukee pitcher Josh Hader tracked down some offensive tweets he made in high school, causing Major League Baseball to sentence him to re-education. Not content with the MLB over-reaction, pompous, social justice warrior thought-control purveyors in the sports media …declaimed that he must be made an example of, shunned, cooked, and eaten, or something. Hader’s pathetic grovel to the mob was so amusing that two more baseball players were quickly subjected to The Hader Gotcha–that will be the Ethics Alarms label to this poison—with similar results. The third time I wrote about the phenomenon was in a non-baseball context, when “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn was fired by Disney because a conservative hit man did a twitter dig and found some of his old tweets.
“Isn’t this great? You can be a sad and lonely schlub with a trivial, insignificant, powerless, witless existence, and yet bring a successful, rich, popular baseball player to his metaphorical knees! Just find and publicize some ill-considered, impulsive tweets sent when fame and fortune weren’t even twinkles in the future star’s eye and the nascent athlete was trying to make do with the under-developed brain of a typical male under the age of 25. Why, it’s even better than dropping rocks on cars as they go under an overpass, or releasing computer viruses! What a rush!…
“No, I have no empathy at all for anyone so desperate to be victimized that they regard themselves as “hurt” by years-old social media comments intended for a small audience by a then-non public figure, and then demand that the author grovel for forgiveness today. People say and write all sorts of stupid and ugly things on a whim or a brain cramp, in private places, in bars and at parties, in texts and tweets, that are not intended for the public at large. These excesses of language and bad taste should not be a matter of public concern or media comment…. The Hader Gotcha, like so many other trends emanating from the world of toxic politics, threatens our liberty, our sanity, and our peace of mind. The miscreants here—the malicious tweet-miners, the Thought Policing journalists, and the cowardly executives—are not merely unethical, they are disgusting.”
However, in this same post I did write, “These are not candidates for public office, who require the public’s trust.”
Da Costa isn’t a candidate for public office, but she isn’t just a professional athlete either.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t think so. I give a lot of grace to teenagers in particular, having been a remarkably brash and overconfident one myself. I think POLITICALLY, Mamdani probably had to do this, but I wish our political system wasn’t so into gotcha games that this was necessary. We used to be a place where youthful errors were tolerated. Hugo Black was significantly older when he joined the Klan…and he was till confirmed for the Supreme Court after he made it clear that he had nothing but contempt for the Klan. It was MLK who said (paraphrasing) that the best friend of the civil rights cause was a white southern reformed racist, because he knew, better than anyone, how evil and comprehensive the superstructure of white supremacy was. A northern white civil rights advocate probably never saw a lynching in person…so sometimes, not only should we forgive trivial political speech, but even sincere allegiances at 18 could be forgiven if there has been a long period of regret and reform and renunciation. Who would better understand the plight of the Palestinians than a Zionist settler who had seen civilians killed in cold blood in a pogrom, and changed his mind about the occupation? Who better to tell the world about the evils of Al Qaeda or ISIS than a former believer who realizes their mistake? Hugo Black, throughout his long career on the bench, was almost always a voice for striking against segregation and white power in law. That doesn’t seem to me to be an accident.
Hugo Black! Maybe my favorite SCOTUS justices of all time; a splendid writer, a keen logician, so superior to the flashier free speech absolutist William O. Douglas but completely overshadowed by him because Douglas was a quote machine. He could never be confirmed today.
All she had to do was say “Yes, I was an idiot teenager, un/miseducated by a broken system. We are here today to fix that system as much as I learned how wrong I was and married a Jewish man and have Jewish children.”. And then be defiant as Trump.
Is it fair to Da Costa? No, but that is also kind of the point.
This treatment is unfair, whether it happens to liberals or conservatives. However, it is a greater injustice if one side allows itself to be immolated, while treating the other side with proper respect.
This of course means we are creating a race to the bottom.
I really don’t know where the pereto optimal solution falls for this prisoner’s dilemma. There are multiple unconnected parties involved. Most of the costs are externalized. The creeps who dig up mildly poor behavior feel none of the blowback. In this case, the real target was Mondani, who is insulated. Only his hired goon get hurt, like the nameless minions of a Bond supervillain who get caught in the crossfires.
I would like to say only one part engages in this behavior, but the pattern of tit for tat make that an over simplification. One party does bear more hypocrisy, claiming early criminal behavior shouldn’t be held against someone, while early […all of the above…]ist before has no statute of limitations. Yet retaliatory behavior makes the other side hypocritical as well, but the utility of self-preservation might offset that hypocrisy.
Query: Is she in fact the mother of Jewish children? I thought only Jewish mothers can bear Jewish children. I assume she’s not a Jew? I’m not even sure conversion is sufficient? Anyone?
As to the quiz, I have no idea. But if the roles were switched and a conservative were in the dock, the conservative would be toast in, appropriately enough, a New York minute. And I’m sure this woman will be quickly rehabilitated and installed in some equally remunerative and cushy position.
I’m 100% for giving grace to Ms. Da Costa for tweets from that long ago, made when she was that young, and which didn’t express anything more than . . . disapproval? . . . as opposed to calls for violence and the like.
A statement like: “Yeah, I wrote it. It was a stupid thing to write. Today, I don’t write or even think things like that anymore because today I know better.” … would be enough for me.
This GOTCHA stuff is a plague, and needs to end. I don’t like double-standards any more than anyone else, but the single standard needs to be NO GOTCHA’s. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
–Dwayne
At age 24, Hader probably handled it reasonably well. He was in his second year, perhaps still classified as a rookie. And his career has continued — he has a unique talent in a field where such talent is very scarce.
This young woman has been an adult for at least 10 years. One might think she would have been able to muster a better defense.
“Distraction?” In fact, I suspect Mandami might welcome this kind of distraction once he takes office. It would be a distraction from what are likely to be failing policies and worsening conditions in his city. Or it may reinforce the perception that he will be anti-semitic.
This may be too harsh on the young woman, but if people cannot stand up for themselves where will this ever end?
I was a high school teenager in 1968 in Massachusetts. One of the things I did during my two years at that high school was circulate a petition supporting the Vietnam war and (I think) Richard Nixon. It wasn’t a popular position, to say the least, but I don’t regret it. I’ve modified my positions somewhat since then, but not the underlying sentiment.