New York City's first lady has broken her silence on a string of resurfaced social media posts that included racial slurs, anti-gay language, and praise for designated terrorists, but her carefully worded apology covered only part of the record. Rama Duwaji, the 28-year-old wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, told arts outlet Hyperallergic she felt "a lot of shame" over old tweets she wrote as a teenager. She did not address the separate, more incendiary posts that celebrated Palestinian militants and mocked the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
The gap between what Duwaji apologized for and what she left unmentioned tells its own story. And it raises a question New Yorkers deserve answered: Does the city's first lady regret glorifying terrorism, or only regret getting caught using slurs?
In her sit-down with Hyperallergic, as the New York Post reported, Duwaji framed the controversy around tweets she posted as a 15-year-old:
"When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn't excuse it."
She added that she had read the public reaction and understood the damage:
"I've read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry."
Duwaji also said the experience "has absolutely changed my life" and that she is "still figuring out how it applies to me as an artist and as a person, both thinking of the future and the past." Her closing line steered the conversation toward her art career: "My focus isn't on being a public figure, but continuing my work with care and responsibility, and allowing my art to speak for itself."
Notice what's missing. Every quoted remark references "old tweets" and "language", the kind of phrasing that maps neatly onto the racial and anti-gay slurs. Not a single word addresses the posts praising plane hijackers, terrorist group members, or the Instagram activity tied to the Oct. 7 massacre.
The Washington Free Beacon unearthed the controversial posts last month, linking some of them to Duwaji partly through facial recognition. The content spanned multiple platforms, X, Tumblr, and Instagram, and stretched from 2013, when she was reportedly 15, into her early twenties.
On X, a 2015 post attributed to Duwaji declared that Tel Aviv "shouldn't exist in the first place" and called its residents "occupiers." Two years earlier, she had used the N-word in another post.
Her now-inactive Tumblr account carried still more inflammatory material. One repost accused U.S. service members of "mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians" in pursuit of "American hegemony." A December 2015 repost blamed white people for the creation of al Qaeda: "You can't blame muslims for terrorism because they didn't construct, fund nor train Al-Qaeda. White People did that too." The same Tumblr hailed Leila Khaled, the Palestinian plane hijacker, and members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The Washington Free Beacon noted that Duwaji's apology did not extend to those older Tumblr and social media posts highlighting figures including Khaled and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh. In other words, the apology was surgically limited to the slurs, the content most likely to draw bipartisan condemnation, while the terrorism-adjacent material went unaddressed.
And then there was the Instagram activity. A week before the broader trove of posts was exposed, Duwaji had already drawn backlash when it emerged she once liked Instagram posts celebrating Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Those posts reportedly shared images of the attack and dismissed Israeli accounts of atrocities as a "mass hoax." Duwaji's interview with Hyperallergic made no reference to any of this.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a vocal critic of Israel, jumped to his wife's defense when the posts first surfaced. He claimed Duwaji is a "private person" who holds no formal role in his administration and should not face scrutiny over her social media activity. He told reporters he would not add much beyond his wife's interview comments and called her a person of "incredible integrity."
The "private person" framing is convenient but thin. Duwaji is not a random New Yorker. She is the spouse of the mayor, lives in the public residence that comes with the office, and carries the title of first lady. When her social media history includes praise for designated terrorist organizations and mockery of a massacre that killed more than 1,200 people, the public has every right to ask questions, and to expect answers that go beyond art-world platitudes.
Fox News reported that Duwaji has also faced criticism during Mamdani's mayoralty for connections to anti-Israel-related artwork, adding another layer to a pattern of scrutiny the couple has struggled to manage.
Mamdani, for his part, remained silent amid the uproar for a stretch before offering his limited remarks. That silence spoke volumes to Jewish leaders and other New Yorkers who expected the mayor to address the substance of the posts, not just wave them away as a private matter.
Duwaji's apology leans heavily on the "I was 15" defense. And it's true, some of the earliest posts date to 2013, when she was a teenager. But the timeline doesn't support a story of youthful indiscretion that ended quickly. Posts continued through 2015, when she was roughly 17 or 18. The Tumblr content praising militants and blaming white people for al Qaeda came from the same period or later. The Instagram likes on posts celebrating the Oct. 7 attack happened in 2023, when she was an adult and her husband was already a public figure.
That arc, from teenage slurs to adult engagement with content celebrating a terrorist massacre, is not a single lapse. It suggests a worldview that persisted well past adolescence. And the selective apology suggests an awareness that the terrorism-related material is harder to explain away than the slurs.
The controversy has already generated real political fallout. Mamdani scheduled a brief sit-down with Orthodox Jewish leaders amid the backlash, an acknowledgment that the damage extends beyond social media chatter and into the communities his administration is supposed to serve.
Consider what a full apology would have required. Duwaji would have had to say, plainly, that praising Leila Khaled, a woman who hijacked civilian aircraft, was wrong. She would have had to acknowledge that liking posts celebrating Oct. 7 was indefensible. She would have had to address the Tumblr content blaming white Americans for terrorism and accusing U.S. troops of slaughter.
She did none of that. Instead, she offered regret for "language" and "hurt", words broad enough to cover the slurs while leaving the rest untouched. The interview was given to an arts publication, not a political press conference. The framing was personal growth, not public accountability.
As we previously reported, Duwaji's Tumblr activity included reposted content praising plane hijackers and bombers, material that goes well beyond the teenage-tweet narrative she offered Hyperallergic. The question is whether anyone in New York's political class will press her on the rest, or whether the partial apology will be accepted as sufficient.
Mamdani's own record on Israel, he has been described as a vocal critic, makes it unlikely that pressure will come from inside City Hall. And the choice of Hyperallergic, an arts outlet, as the venue for Duwaji's first public remarks ensured the conversation stayed on her terms, in friendly territory, with no follow-up questions about Hamas or the PFLP.
New York City's Jewish community, the largest in the country, watched the mayor's wife like Instagram posts that called the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust a "mass hoax." They watched the mayor dismiss the controversy as a private matter. And now they've watched the first lady apologize for slurs while saying nothing about the terrorism content that cut deepest.
Taxpayers and residents who expect basic decency from the people who occupy Gracie Mansion are not asking for perfection. They're asking for honesty. A real apology names the offense. A strategic one names only what's politically convenient.
Duwaji chose the strategic version. The record speaks for itself, even if she won't.