Queens assemblymember and city comptroller hopeful Jenifer Rajkumar said a perpetrator smashed a door bearing her image and rifled through drawers at her district office in Woodhaven early Thursday in what police are treating as an attempted burglary.
“The more Team Jenifer is targeted, the stronger we become,” Rajkumar told the Daily News.
The NYPD is treating the incident as a burglary and said nothing was taken.
Video footage shows the break-in happened around 4 a.m. and a person carrying a black bag was spotted at the scene leaving behind open desk drawers, according to Jacob Gross, a senior adviser to Rajkumar.
The incident comes after Rajkumar, a strong political ally of Mayor Adams known for her near omnipresence at his side at events outside her district in Glendale, Ozone Park, Richmond Hill and Woodhaven, officially announced her 2025 campaign for city comptroller earlier this month. She launched her comptroller fundraising committee in July.
Rajkumar referred to statistics showing nearly half of state representatives have experienced threats of violence and that a majority of women said they were less likely to run for office because of “toxic politics.”
“I cannot speak with certainty, but I am the only woman in this race and women are regularly targeted,” she said. “And also, there’s a lot of hate generally in the world right now, and a lot of toxicity in our political discourse, but Team Jenifer is here to unite the city and to bring people together and to lead.”
The race for comptroller turned ugly shortly after Rajkumar announced her run, with a parody campaign site popping up that labeled her a “grifter,” “con artist” and “Eric Adams 2.0,” and linked to critical news stories and social media posts.
It’s unclear how much money Rajkumar has raised since there hasn’t been a new campaign filing deadline since she announced her run. But her first filing from early July showed that she had just one donation — a $65 contribution from herself. That brought her fundraising operation to a negative balance of $19,435.
With Thomas Tracy
