His lawyer, Dawn Florio, said at the time that her client felt as if he were being turned from a victim into a villain.
“Bishop Whitehead has pled not guilty, and is looking forward to having his day in court, so that he can fight these charges,” Florio said in a statement Friday.
In charging documents, prosecutors made no mention of the friendship that Miller-Whitehead developed with the city’s mayor while he served as Brooklyn’s borough president before his election to the city’s top job.
But an evidentiary request from prosecutors suggests the mayor’s relationship with Miller-Whitehead might become a focal point at the trial. Prosecutors are seeking to require a writer for The New Yorker to testify about a January 2023 article titled, “The Mayor and the Con Man.”
Attorney Rachel Strom, who represents New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach, argued in a letter to Judge Lorna G. Schofield that prosecutors were trying to “authenticate a generic, run-of-the-mill denial” that Whitehead made about his dealings with the mayor once Adams knew he was the target of an investigation.
“The Subpoena is highly invasive, would expose the journalist to cross examination (potentially putting other confidential sources at risk), and make the journalist effectively an arm of law enforcement,” she wrote. The judge was expected to rule before opening statements.
At a news conference last week, the mayor was asked about legal filings in the case indicating prosecutors planned to show jurors evidence that Miller-Whitehead used the name of Adams to commit fraud and attempted extortion.
Adams responded that anyone reporting about it should “quote the documents that stated that clearly he did not have authorization and there was no connectivity to the actions of (the) mayor or borough president.”
Among pretrial evidentiary rulings, the judge has agreed to exclude mention of Miller-Whitehead’s criminal conviction for identity theft and grand larceny, which…
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