Bill DeBlasio ‘Never Once’ Claimed to be Ex-Mayor – Says He’s Just a Guy Who Opened His Email and Gave His ‘Opinion’

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Long Island wine importer Bill DeBlasio has insisted he “never once” claimed to be Bill de Blasio after a transatlantic case of mistaken identity that left him fending off accusations that he’d impersonated the former New York mayor to fool a British reporter.

Speaking exclusively to Semafor, via his Ring doorbell, DeBlasio explained that he was contacted via email by Times of London journalist Bevan Hurley asking for his opinions on the city’s current Democratic mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and his policies.

The journalist emailed what he thought was the former mayor’s address, but the real recipient was the Long Island DeBlasio, who decided to respond anyway.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” he said from Florida. “I never once said I was the mayor. [The journalist] never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

“I could have corrected him,” he added. “It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print.”

Using ChatGPT to help craft his reply, he criticized Mamdani’s plans as unlikely to generate the revenue he has promised, words that the journalist then used to write an explosive news piece that the ex-mayor rages was “entirely false and fabricated.”

When the Times discovered its mistake, however, it swiftly deleted the article and issued a statement saying its reporter “had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.” The New York Times, reporting on the mix-up, also framed Long Island DeBlasio as a “de Blasio impersonator.”

DeBlasio bristled at that characterization in conversation with Semafor and offered little sympathy for the journalist who tangled his inbox with City Hall intrigue, saying he’d suffered a decade of de Blasio’s “brutal, vicious hate mail.”

The wine seller branded the reporting “lazy,” though he conceded he believed the journalist would “have all his people check it out.”

He went on to recall once meeting de Blasio at a 2016 Mets playoff game, where the then-mayor asked: “How bad is it having the same last name as me?”

“Dude, you’re killing me,” he joked back.

An extra twist, of course, is that the ex-mayor was in fact born Warren Wilhelm Jr., changing his name to Bill de Blasio officially in 2001. Meanwhile, Long Island Bill DeBlasio, as he told Semafor, has “always been Bill DeBlasio.”

As for the wine seller’s official opinion on Mamdani, he told Semafor: “To be honest, I don’t think it’s feasible, unless you’re gonna be in office for 10 years.”

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