New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani was forced to revise an emotional story about his family after acknowledging that the woman he called his “aunt” was actually his father’s cousin. Mamdani had claimed the relative stopped riding the subway after the September 11th terrorist attacks because she feared wearing her hijab in public. Questions quickly emerged about the woman’s identity and whether the story matched his actual family history. Mamdani later defended his wording by saying he’d always regarded the distant relative as an aunt.
Mamdani delivered the story on Friday, October 24th, while speaking outside the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx. Surrounded by faith leaders, the democratic socialist accused former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, and Mayor Eric Adams of promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric during the closing stretch of the mayoral campaign. Mamdani became visibly emotional as he described what he called the “indignities” experienced by Muslim New Yorkers.
“I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab,” Mamdani told the crowd. His description naturally led listeners to believe he was talking about a biological aunt who had been living in New York when terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11th, 2001.
As Straight Arrow News reported, subsequent scrutiny revealed that the relative was a distant cousin on Mamdani’s father’s side. Critics had initially identified Mamdani’s biological aunt, Dr. Masuma Mamdani, whose LinkedIn page reportedly showed that she worked in Tanzania from January 2000 through December 2003. Publicly available photographs also reportedly showed Masuma Mamdani without a hijab. Those details raised immediate questions about the tearful account and prompted reporters to press Mamdani for an explanation.
Mamdani finally clarified the relationship while speaking with reporters on Monday, October 27th. “I was speaking about Zehra fuhi, my father’s cousin, who passed away a few years ago,” he said, according to a report from Fox News. The admission confirmed that the woman invoked during his speech was not, in fact, his biological aunt. It also came only after online investigators challenged the original version and reporters began asking who Mamdani had been describing.
Vice President JD Vance was among the prominent figures who mocked the original story. “According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks,” Vance wrote on X. Mamdani responded by accusing critics of using the discrepancy to distract from his broader claims about anti-Muslim prejudice in New York. The vice president’s post nevertheless helped propel the questions surrounding Mamdani’s account into a national political controversy.
Watch Mamdani make the original claim here:
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Mamdani’s defense rested on the way he says extended relatives are described within his family. Reports said “fuhi” is used in Hindi and Urdu to mean a paternal aunt, and Mamdani maintained that he had referred to his father’s cousin that way throughout his life. His alleged cultural excuse addressed why he may have used the word “aunt,” but it didn’t change the true family relationship he disclosed after the speech.
The candidate continued to insist that critics were focusing on a family label instead of the message he wanted to deliver. “The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker,” he said during the original speech. Mamdani added that Muslim residents had been told for too long to “ask for less” and endure “hatred and bigotry in the shadows.”
The controversy erupted just days before New Yorkers were scheduled to choose between Mamdani, Cuomo, and Sliwa in the November 4th mayoral election. Mamdani had made his Muslim identity and allegations of Islamophobia a central part of his closing argument after facing sustained criticism over his anti-Israel record. Asked directly about the disputed family description, Mamdani refused to concede that he had lied, saying, “My father’s cousin is my aunt. That is how I referred to her all my life.”