Despite state Assemblymember Nikki Lucas claiming for over a month that she is the new boss of the Brooklyn Democratic Party—elected in a late-night Sunday Zoom call where participants were repeatedly warned that they were in contempt of court—a judge has ruled that no, she is not.
The ruling is the latest swerve in a nearly indecipherable sequence of events that began in June, when a reformist faction of the party won enough district leader seats to take over the party leadership. That prompted former Party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn to take a series of extraordinary measures to retain power, culminating with the October 4 10 p.m. Zoom meeting to "elect" Lucas, Bichotte Hermelyn's close ally, as her successor. The reformist faction of the party almost immediately filed a lawsuit to nullify the meeting after it happened.
On Tuesday, Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Peter Sweeney ordered that that meeting was not legal and that "no chair or any other officers of the Executive Committee were elected at such meeting."
For the past month, Lucas has been plastering her new title up and down marketing and fundraising fliers, right up to the day Sweeney's decision came down.