OPEN LETTER TO NEW ROCHELLE MAYOR NOAM BRAMSON: Talk of the Sound Has Never Accused You of Being Unfaithful to Your Wife

New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson has not responded to the following email, sent three months ago.

Reader can draw their own conclusion as to why the Mayor has failed to respond.

From: Robert Cox
Subject: Your statements in Executive Session
Date: March 19, 2013 1:50:46 PM EDT
To: Noam Bramson
Cc: Ivar Hyden , Louis Trangucci , Al Tarantino , Barry Fertel , Shari Rackman , Jared Rice

Dear Mr. Mayor,

It is a rare day indeed that I address an email to you so I trust you will appreciate the serious nature of this email.

It has come to my attention that in Executive Session after the City Council meeting on the night the vote on the positions of Assistant Police Commissioner you took the opportunity to digress onto a topic not covered under the list of exceptions under the New York State Open Meetings Law and thus violated that law. Specifically, to advise members of counsel that they should not communicate with me and to complain about various articles I have written and otherwise speak about me in a derogatory manner.

It is my understanding that you asserted something to the effect that I had made a claim that you had been unfaithful to your wife.

Further that your claim was related to this article:

“Happy Ending” for New Rochelle as Prostitution Complaint Filed by Mayor Noam Bramson Leads to Two Arrests at Avalon One

If my understanding is somehow incorrect or incomplete I would hope you would explain. Absent that I am going to take it that my understanding is essentially correct.

Let me address the assertion I understood you to have made.

I have never written a single word, said aloud or even thought once about any aspect of your personal relationship with your wife and certainly not that you have been unfaithful to your wife.

The article above accurately states what transpired based on records I obtained under FOIL. Records show you filed a complaint about the spa and the police investigated the complaint and made 2 arrests. I never made any statement or even inferred that you had done anything improper. Quite the opposite, the article credits you for being the cause of a successful police investigation. The simple fact is that an arrest for prostitution initiated by a Mayor is a new story in any town, pure and simple.

Here is the irony.

It was always my understanding that you filed the complaint based on information provided to you by your mother, who lives nearby at 40 Memorial Highway, about a block away.

Having left that part of the story out in order to protect the identify of your mother, you have managed to twist that around into the notion that I claimed that you had made a complaint based on direct personal experience, something I never wrote — or even thought. That somehow I have asserted that you were unfaithful to your wife.

Your claim is both untrue and not supported by the facts. However, if you wish to continue to make an issue out of this, I can run a new story, revising the information contained in the article to make it clear that your mother told you what she had heard and you filed a complaint based on what your mother told you. I would, of course, explain to my readers WHY a revised version of the story was being published — your false claim made in an illegal executive session following the APC vote which you lost.

I neither mentioned your mother or your wife or ever said anything about you patronizing the spa or anything like that. I wrote a story based on government records that is both true and accurately reported.

I would not feel a need to pursue this matter further if you were to simply REPLY ALL to this email and acknowledge the statement you made was false as regards your claim regarding marital fidelity.

However, if you will not do that then I will feel that you have left me no choice but to address the entire matter with a revised story in the context of you having used Executive Session to defame me to the entire City Council all while violating the New York State Open Meetings Law.

How I proceed from here is in your hands.

I gather you are traveling outside the country so I will hold any story until next week.

Sincerely,

Robert Cox

Managing Editor
New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound
http://www.newrochelletalk.com