She’s a PR princess. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s influencer army is led by the scion of a public relations empire — who obliviously defended her shady Signal chats by slamming the “legacy press” and its wealthy owners Friday.
Page A3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 4 September 2026
City Hall admits its secret 200-influencer chat broke records law, its gatekeeper blames press that found it.
As it ran on the front
NYC's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, has admitted the mayor's office broke the city's record-keeping rules while running a 200-strong influencer operation through a Signal chat that had been set to auto-delete until last week. All together now — line one: Kassem says officials took "corrective actions," but only after a reporter told them the thread had been wiping itself the whole time.
That is the order of events, stated plainly. Not an internal review found the vanishing chat. Not an audit. A reporter asked a question, and the answer that came back was that the city's own record-keeping rules had already been broken, in real time, by a chat engineered to leave nothing behind.…
…(cont) The chat is not new information; the morgue has it dated. On September 2, the 200-strong influencer army was already public record — an operation blurring the line between campaign work and a City Hall job. Two days later, the rules that army broke became public record too, by way of the city's own top lawyer, admitting it on the record.
Which leaves the question of who runs the thing that broke the rules. City Hall's head of New Media is Emilia Winter Rowland, whose grandfather appears to have founded The Rowland Agency, a public relations empire. Asked to answer for a Signal chat set to erase itself, she answered instead by attacking the "legacy press" and its wealthy owners.
Two hundred influencers did not ask their gatekeeper to defend an app that deletes its own evidence. She volunteered. That is the shape of the whole thing: the rules got broken, the breaking got admitted, and the person paid to talk about it chose instead to talk about the people who noticed.
That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal answers the record. This answered the reporter. The rules did not ask who found them broken; they were simply broken, on a 200-person chat, by a City Hall that has since taken "corrective actions" — after, not before, somebody looked.
“They built a chat that erases itself and then called getting caught "corrective action" — that's not a slip, that's a business plan for how City Hall talks to itself without ever having to answer for it later. Two hundred people on that payroll, and the one thing management protected wasn't the taxpayer's business, it was the paper trail. When the record disappears on its own, so does anybody's chance to ask why the money went to shaping how the office looks instead of what it does.”
“Look, the "legacy press" fixation on "transparency" ignores that the office already took corrective actions — that's accountability, that's the system working, that's — okay, corrective actions after a reporter caught the auto-delete isn't exactly the flex I want it to be, but the point stands, this is about biased reporters, not — wait, did I just concede the chat broke the rule? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem revealed that officials took "corrective actions" over the chat, but only after learning from a reporter that the message thread was set to auto-delete until last week.
· Mamdani’s 200-strong ‘influencer’ army revealed — blurring lines between campaign and job from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.