Exclusive / British newspaper spoke to the wrong de Blasio, not an ‘imposter’

Brendan Ruberry and Max Tani

Updated Oct 30, 2025, 4:48am CDT

Bill DeBlasio

The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”

He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.

“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”

The episode began earlier this week when a reporter for the quality British newspaper, Bevan Hurley, sent a polite email to an email address containing the full name belonging both to the wine seller and the two-term New York mayor, who spells “de” with a lowercase “d” and inserts a space between the two parts of his surname. (In DeBlasio’s view, “low-class Italians use a little d.“)

The Times reporter, Hurley, was researching “an article looking at Zohran Mamdani’s policy plans and their estimated costs,” he wrote. “I would greatly appreciate your insights on Mr Mandani’s ambitious agenda, potential obstacles, and whether the sums add up.”

DeBlasio understood the situation. “I could have corrected him,” he said. Instead, he played along. He used ChatGPT to compose a response criticizing Mamdani’s tax plans, in particular, as unlikely to raise the requisite revenue.

“It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print,” DeBlasio said. He assumed the reporter would “have all his people check it out.”

The Times deleted the article from its website, and issued a statement claiming that “our reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.”

DeBlasio was particularly annoyed at the idea that, by operating under his own name, he could labeled an imposter or, as The New York Times put it, a “de Blasio impersonator.”

And indeed, he was tired of getting the former mayor’s email — which had amounted to a decade of “brutal, vicious hate mail.”

DeBlasio said he met de Blasio once, at a 2016 New York Mets play-off game. He said he was asked by security guards, who couldn’t believe the coincidence, “Hey, do you want to meet the real Bill de Blasio?”

“How bad is it having the same last name as me?” DeBlasio recalls the mayor asking him.

He responded: “Dude, you’re killing me.”

DeBlasio said he thought the journalism that swept him into a story and brought Semafor to his Long Island doorstep was “lazy,” but in the end, the reporter had quoted him accurately. He’s not sure Mamdani will be able to pull off his ambitious agenda.

“To be honest, I don’t think it’s feasible, unless you’re gonna be in office for 10 years,” he said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791635&forum_id=2.#49387609)

lol'd that this dood started off by saying "i've always been bill deblasio" considering the mayor one started off as "warrren wilhelm jr" or whatever and changed it a couple times over the years to end up with the name

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791635&forum_id=2.#49387623)