Rama Duwaji, the 28-year-old wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, deactivated an old X account after days of media scrutiny over years-old posts that included racial slurs, anti-American screeds, and content praising designated terrorists. Searches for the account @_RamaDee now show it no longer exists.
The account vanished Thursday, one day after the Washington Free Beacon published a report detailing what it described as a trail of inflammatory social media activity stretching back to 2013. The Free Beacon said it linked the accounts to Duwaji using facial recognition software.
The disappearing act came as New York's First Lady was riding a wave of favorable press. She had recently posed for a cover feature in The Cut. Her Instagram account, still active, boasts over two million followers. But the polished public image collided with a very different digital footprint, one that, if the reporting holds, paints a picture of someone who spent years sharing content that most Americans would find repulsive.
The earliest post cited dates to 2013, when Duwaji was 15. The Daily Mail reported that she apparently used a vile racial slur in a tweet to a friend, writing: "Helllll yeah, n****. Super duper genius* excuse you." The Free Beacon's report also cited a 2013 post in which she used a slur targeting gay people: "Whyyyyyy are all these fgts folllowing meeeeeeeee."
Those weren't the only posts from that period. Other content attributed to accounts linked to Duwaji blamed "white people" for the creation of Al-Qaeda. One Tumblr upload read: "You can't blame Muslims for terrorism because they didn't construct, fund, or train Al-Qaeda." It continued: "White people did that, too."
She also appeared to write on X that Israelis should not be allowed to live in Tel Aviv, calling it a city that "shouldn't exist in the first place" and labeling its residents "occupiers." The Free Beacon cited a fuller thread she had reposted: "Fuck #TelAviv. Shouldn't exist in the first place. They're occupiers. You celebrate them."
By 2015, the posts turned sharper. The account took aim at U.S. troops, describing them not as brave but as "mercilessly slaughtering third world civilians to maintain American hegemony." That same year, on International Women's Day, an account linked to Duwaji posted a tribute to Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, described as the militant leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Ghazaleh participated in several attacks and died in 1968 when a bomb she was building exploded in her home.
Then, in 2017, a Tumblr account linked to Duwaji reposted an image of Leila Khaled, hailed by terrorists as the first woman to hijack a plane after participating in plane takeovers in 1969 and 1970. The repost included a quote attributed to Khaled: "If it does good for my cause, I'll be happy to accept death."
Let that sink in. The wife of the man now running America's largest city shared content glorifying a plane hijacker and a bomb-maker, and the evidence suggests she did so not once, in a moment of youthful carelessness, but repeatedly across multiple platforms over several years.
The discovery of the older posts came shortly after Duwaji made headlines for a separate controversy: liking social media posts that appeared to celebrate the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a story that initially drew little mainstream media attention. Nearly 1,200 people died that day.
One post Duwaji reportedly liked came from an account called The Slow Factory. It included images of groups of people after having taken over an IDF vehicle, along with the text "Free Palestine." Another image in the same post read: "Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation."
A separate image showed a bulldozer used by Hamas to break through into Israel. Fox News reported that Jewish Insider and The Free Press had documented Duwaji liking posts in the aftermath of October 7 that were critical of Israel, including one claiming The New York Times' investigation into sexual violence on October 7 was fabricated. The reports sparked intense criticism from conservatives, pro-Israel voices, and some Jewish leaders.
Newsmax noted the posts reportedly predated Duwaji's marriage to Mamdani by about a year and a half. That timing matters because it undercuts any argument that the likes were some kind of private spousal solidarity gesture. She apparently endorsed these sentiments on her own, before she had any connection to City Hall.
When pressed about his wife's social media activity, Mayor Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, did not deny the reports. Instead, he tried to draw a line between himself and his spouse.
"My wife is the love of my life, and she is also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall."
The "private person" defense is hard to square with reality. Duwaji has over two million Instagram followers and recently sat for a glossy magazine cover shoot. She is the First Lady of New York City. That is not a private life.
A spokesman for the mayor offered a more formal statement to Jewish Insider:
"Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7 was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally."
Clear and consistent about Hamas, perhaps. But Mamdani himself has come under fire in the past after apparently using anti-Israel phrases, including "globalize the intifada." He was previously grilled about his wife's social media presence and dodged questions about the October 7 likes. The pattern of deflection has drawn sustained scrutiny.
The playbook here is familiar. Offensive content surfaces. The account disappears. The principal claims ignorance or distance. A spokesperson issues a boilerplate condemnation of the thing everyone already agrees is bad. And the press is expected to move on.
When the Daily Mail searched the accounts in question, the content appeared to have been deleted. Breitbart reported that after the Beacon article was published, Duwaji deactivated the old X account. The Daily Mail said it reached out to Mayor Mamdani for comment. No response from Duwaji herself has been reported.
Open questions remain. Did Duwaji personally deactivate the account, or did X remove it? What exactly did the Washington Free Beacon's facial recognition analysis involve beyond what has been disclosed? And why, if these posts were youthful mistakes, did the pattern continue into 2017, when Duwaji was in her late teens, and then appear to resurface in the form of October 7 likes when she was a grown adult?
Nobody expects perfection from a 15-year-old's social media. But praising plane hijackers at 19 is not a typo. Liking posts that celebrate a massacre of 1,200 people is not a slip of the thumb. And scrubbing the evidence when journalists come calling is not accountability.
New York City deserves a First Lady who doesn't need a cleanup crew every time someone checks her digital history. What it got instead is a cautionary tale about what happens when radical politics meets polished branding, and the brand cracks.
