Manhattan District Attorney Candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein Would Be the First Woman and Immigrant to Hold the Position

Before she was a Rhodes Scholar, a Supreme Court clerk for Sandra Day O’Connor, or counsel to Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, Tali Farhadian Weinstein was a nine year old girl piling into her parents’ wood-paneled station wagon. The Farhadians took weekend drives from their home in Old Tappan, New Jersey, as a form of free entertainment. On one such day trip, the family pulled up to Yale University and Fardhadian Weinstein remembers her mother, Farah, telling her: “You can go here if you want.”

It was an “insane” statement, Farhadian Weinstein says on a recent roasting Monday at the former doggie day care on New York’s Upper West Side where her campaign for Manhattan district attorney is now headquartered. “I don't think that their joint income could have paid for one person to go to Yale.” Farah was—still is—a high school math teacher; Farhadian Weinstein’s father, Nasser Dan, is a retired engineer. But limitations—financial or otherwise—didn’t hamper their sense of possibility. According to Farhadian Weinstein: “It’s an attitude.”

The Farhadians, a Jewish family of four, fled virulent anti-Semitism in Iran in the thick of the Islamic Revolution, arriving at New York’s JFK Airport on Christmas Eve 1979—Farah with pots, pans, and scant toys in her luggage. A dubious officer, working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, questioned their tourist visas but ultimately allowed Farah, Tali, and her younger brother, Leeor, temporary entry; their father had come earlier to find work. (A years-long bid for asylum followed, with pro bono help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.) Farhadian Weinstein was only four years old—she remembers little except for the disorienting feeling of not speaking or understanding English, “like landing on another planet.”

The experience shaped her outlook, years later, as a law student, as general counsel for Brooklyn district attorney Eric Gonzalez and, now, as a leading candidate for Manhattan D.A.: “A focus of the Jewish tradition is to identify with strangers, to remember that you are a stranger,” Farhadian Weinstein told me, sipping iced coffee in a navy linen suit while sitting among boxes of campaign materials. (Farhadian Weinstein changed her last name when she married Boaz Weinstein, a hedge fund founder, in 2010.) Her own refugee story would later stand in stark contrast to what was experienced by many during the Trump-era (and pre-Trump-era) immigration crackdowns. “I'm not any better than the millions of people who have been turned away in the exact same circumstance,” she said. In a 2019 New York Times op-ed, Farhadian Weinstein wrote about a “life and career made possible because the law was not enforced against me,” an abiding example of the balance between the literal “letter of the law,” she wrote, “and the spirit of the law.”

“A focus of the Jewish tradition is to identify with strangers, to remember that you are a stranger.”

A similar tension—how to be a progressive and still be a prosecutor—is at the heart of Farhadian Weinstein’s bid for Manhattan D.A., a local law-enforcement post that routinely draws international attention when defendants such as Harvey Weinstein or the late Jeffrey Epstein fall under its purview. The winner of the current race could inherit the Manhattan D.A.’s most high-profile case ever: that of Donald Trump, whose business practices are currently under grand jury investigation by the office.

“On the one hand, we're really trying to shrink the criminal-justice system safely and to be more sensitive and thoughtful about the prosecutions that we bring,” Farhadian Weinstein said. In the Brooklyn D.A’s office, where she worked from 2018 to 2020, she created the country’s first post-conviction justice bureau, examining wrongful convictions, many related to crimes ostensibly committed by men of color. (The bureau often works cooperatively with the Innocence Project, which coauthored a report with the office.) “On the other hand, there is this vast area of violence, where I think generally we have not done enough.” The rise of violent crime—broadly—is on many voters’ minds this summer, but Farhadian Weinstein is talking about gender-based crimes like sexual assault and domestic violence. The current Manhattan D.A., Cyrus Vance Jr., has come under fire after his office argued to reduce Epstein’s sex-offender status in 2011 and declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual abuse in 2015, even though police, with help from model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, caught him on tape. Vance is retiring this year after serving three terms.

Farhadian Weinstein has emerged as a relative moderate among her seven opponents in the June 22 Democratic primary. (The winner of the primary will almost certainly go on to become the D.A., given the overwhelming Democratic leaning of New York’s electorate.) Her opponents largely support defunding the police, while she advocates for evidence-based reforms, including community alternatives to police. (“If I had all the money in the world, I would want a police officer and a social worker to respond” to domestic-violence calls, she tells me.) In a recent primary debate, former prosecutor and D.A. candidate Alvin Bragg, with whom a recent poll shows her to be in a dead heat, proudly stressed that he’d only ever prosecuted one misdemeanor, touting his record as a sign of his progressive bona fides. “Strangling your wife is a misdemeanor. Breaking into a synagogue and vandalizing is a misdemeanor,” Farhadian Weinstein replied. “I think that they have lopped off the prosecutor part of progressive prosecutor,” she tells me of her primary competition.

On folding chairs situated toward the back of the former canine camp, I think aloud that it sounds like a fine line: to be compassionate but also tough; to balance the letter and the spirit of the law; and to do all this in the former epicenter of the pandemic. But Farhadian Weinstein says: “I actually don't see it as a conflict at all.”

A decade after her family’s fateful station-wagon ride, Farhadian Weinstein went to Yale and, later, Yale Law School.

In the last 79 years, only three men have held the elected office of Manhattan district attorney (Frank Hogan, from 1942 to 1974; Robert Morgenthau from 1975 to 2009 and, for the past 12 years, Vance). Even in this historic melting pot, Farhadian Weinstein would be the first immigrant and the first woman. She is also the first to propose the creation of a special Bureau of Gender-Based Violence to address often-underreported and underprosecuted sex crimes and domestic violence, including those connected to human trafficking, elder abuse, stalking, and gender-based hate crimes. She notes that domestic violence is behind one in five New York City homicides and accounts for two in five felony assaults. Before the pandemic, Farhadian Weinstein says, domestic violence was the number one cause of homelessness in the city.

Based on these statistics, it’s staggering that something like a Bureau of Gender-Based Violence doesn’t exist already. Then again, given the almost century-long male stronghold on the D.A.’s office, maybe not. “I think that it can be a very hard thing for men to understand,” Farhadian Weinstein says. “I live in a woman’s body, right? I know that we experience the world differently.” Focusing on gender-based violence is Farhadian Weinstein’s way of infusing prosecution with progressive values: “Who is the most vulnerable to harm?” she says. “And what does that do to her when she experiences that? Progress is about leveling the playing field.” Referring to her role alongside Holder as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland, for whom she clerked when he was a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she says: “I've been lucky to have had many roles where I've been sitting at the right hand of the father, so to speak. I think, for many women, you suddenly arrive at a time when you say, ‘I have my own vision.’”

There is no doubt that Farhadian Weinstein is leaning into her identity as a feminist candidate—and that it is resonating. The proposed Bureau for Gender-Based Violence “is visionary,” Sonia Ossorio, president of National Organization for Women (NOW) New York, tells me. “There is still so much to do to get to the point where women's lives mean more.” In a recent New York Daily News op-ed , Ossorio and Gloria Steinem endorsed Farhadian Weinstein as “the D.A. candidate women should support.” Hillary Clinton endorsed her this week as a “barrier breaker” and “game changer” who has been “a fierce advocate for victims whose voices are often silenced.”

“I live in a woman’s body, right? I know that we experience the world differently.”

When I tagged along with Farhadian Weinstein to canvass at the Upper West Side’s 72nd street subway station, we were met by a band of young, female volunteers, including many of color, who greeted her with chants of “Tali! Tali!” Outside her campaign office, a brawny man walking an intimidating dog informs Farhadian Weinstein that he’s voting for her and “only voting for women, ever, for anything.”

Farhadian Weinstein has also faced fierce criticism. She’s been branded the Wall Street candidate after her campaign raised $4.4 million, including large sums from a cluster of finance-sector donors—more than any of her opponents and an unheard-of sum for a district attorney race. (Bragg, her closest fundraising competitor, had raised a reported $2 million as of late May). Her war chest has sparked questions about her ability to fairly prosecute white-collar crime. “I will prosecute anyone who breaks the law, including my donors,” Farhadian Weinstein said in a recent televised debate.

She maintains in our interview that her opponents have “competed to raise money in the same quarters,” but criticism flared again last week when campaign finance disclosures revealed Farhadian Weinstein donated $8.2 million to her own campaign in the two-week span between May 20 and June 7. Bragg received $1 million from Color of Change PAC, and former prosecutor Lucy Lang donated $500,000 to her own Manhattan D.A. bid, but, as City & State NY reporter Jeff Coltin noted, Farhadian Weinstein’s self-donation is “by far the biggest” of the race. “An average NYC family makes $64,000/year,” civil-rights attorney and fellow Manhattan D.A. candidate Tahanie Aboushi tweeted. “My opponent, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, dropped 128x that in just 2 weeks to buy this election.” In a statement, Farhadian Weinstein’s spokesperson, Jennifer Blatus, pointed out that Farhadian Weinstein was “not the only candidate who has chosen to self-fund. With a super PAC advertising against us, our campaign is making sure that voters across Manhattan get a clear sense of the difference between the candidates in this race.” Farhadian Weinstein further came under fire in Thursday night's primary debate for a campaign ad attacking Bragg and New York State Assembly member Dan Quart as endangering women and families.

The narrative around fundraising has bled into questions about her husband’s occupation, including his net worth, estimated at $450 million by Forbes in 2012. “I wonder…if the critique around fundraising would have been different if my husband did not work on Wall Street,” she says. “I'm hearing so much about my husband in this debate. He's a lovely person, but he's not running for district attorney. Why are we talking about him so much? And if we are talking about him all the time, why are we not talking about the fact that he is being a primary parent to three little girls so that it is possible for his spouse to run for district attorney?” (Farhadian Weinstein has three daughters, ages six, eight, and nine.)

“I find that there's not a particularly subtle sexism to how much her husband's salary seems to be...an immediate indictment of her ability to be fair,” Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, Weinstein’s rabbi and longtime friend, tells me. Buchdahl has known Farhadian Weinstein since their Yale days and officiated her wedding to Weinstein. “She's a very strong, powerful woman, and…I don't think it's always easy for women like that to find a partner that not just supports them but isn't intimidated by them,” Buchdahl said. After her first coffee with the couple, “I was like, ‘She found him.’” (In 2010, when the legal blog Above the Law wrote about the couple in its Wedding Watch, it called Farhadian Weinstein a “Persian beauty…who’s been slobbered on enough in her life, and we won’t embarrass her more here. Suffice it to say that she’s as lovely as her résumé.”)

Part of Farhadian Weinstein wants to talk about the logistical hoops and childcare puzzles required for a mother of three daughters to run for office. (Campaigning is consuming her time, but she is a devoted, hands-on mom who, despite her high-profile jobs, has been known to hand-sew her daughters' costumes for the Jewish holiday Purim, according to Buchdahl.) While she wants to praise her husband for stepping up, she’s also conscious that excess praise perpetuates something of a double standard: “Where are the gold stars for all of the women who took care of the kids while their husbands ran for office?” Her male counterparts, she notes, including Bragg and Quart, aren’t probed about their partners or children. At one point, Farhadian Weinstein says, a journalist asked her if she considered that she might be putting her children in harm’s way, given the level of crime she would be responsible for prosecuting. “The idea that I might be a bad mother for doing this,” she tells me. “I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't think anyone’s asked Alvin or Dan if they had weighed that.”

The other man looming large over the Manhattan D.A. race, catapulting it to one of national interest, is Trump. Officially, Farhadian Weinstein says she cannot comment on the grand jury investigation into the former president. “I've spoken a lot about my identity as an immigrant and how central that is to me, but the other word that I used to describe myself, which is far less sexy, is that I'm a lawyer,” she says. “When it comes to targets or subjects of investigations, we are only supposed to speak through indictments and jury verdicts.”

Still, Farhadian Weinstein can’t resist “getting on her stump a little bit” about the Trump question. “The fact that a case of this magnitude could be prosecuted in this office tells you something about the special jurisdiction,” of the Manhattan D.A., she says. “It's about having a kind of judgment to answer unprecedented questions in a national spotlight, against high-powered litigants on the other side, and to do those with an even temperament and fearlessly and without being intimidated.” She cites her work on the Supreme Court with Day O’Connor and at the Justice Department under Holder. “It would not be my first rodeo in terms of taking on something that is new and hard and big.”

Given his record for public attacks against women, immigrants, and authority figures holding him to account, it’s not hard to imagine that Trump could target a District Attorney Farhadian Weinstein. A recent New York Times story posited that Trump would have ammunition to lash out at Farhadian Weinstein if she were to win the Manhattan D.A. seat, citing the fact that she reportedly met with lawyers for his administration in its early days about a potential judgeship. (According to the Times, she took the meeting, but when it “became heated during a disagreement over constitutional law...the conversation never went further.”) When I asked the campaign for comment, Blatus said simply: “It would have been great to have had a pro-choice, pro-immigrant judge on the federal bench.”

If this all were to come to pass, it wouldn’t be the first time Farhadian Weinstein did her job under the threat of intimidation. As she details in a campaign ad, she was pregnant with her third daughter, now six, and working in the violent crime and gangs unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office when she got a call from law enforcement saying that someone she was prosecuting for murder had put out a hit on her, with the intent of causing so much stress that she would have a miscarriage. “There was a period of time...until that threat was resolved where I didn't know...what would happen. And I just had to make the decision to keep doing my job while the U.S. marshals escorted me around.”

Hate crimes, including those against the Jewish and Asian American communities, have also weighed on her personally. “My dad could not go to school on rainy days in Iran,” she told me as we rode downtown, because “there were people that said that something washed off of the Jewish kids when they got wet and contaminated everybody.” (Farhadian Weinstein is held up getting into the ride, stopped on the street by two former students of her mother’s and a Persian singer giving her a benediction.) When we get out on Mott Street in the heart of Chinatown, colorful paper lanterns bobbing overhead, attorney Hugh Mo—a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and the first-ever AsianAmerican to hold the title—greets her with wishful thinking: “Ms. D.A.” Justin Chin-Shan Yu, president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the unofficial mayor of Chinatown, welcomes Farhadian Weinstein into the building for a roundtable with local leaders about the recent rash of hate crimes against the Asian American community. This is the place where the children of Chinatown come to learn Chinese, but the classrooms are empty today.

David Lee, founder of the League of Asian Americans of New York, raises the issue of crime, pointing to Farhadian Weinstein’s opponents, many of whom have said they would not prosecute a variety of misdemeanors. Farhadian Weinstein returns to the question of progressive prosecution. “It is always important to remember that not all of our options are in the past,” Farhadian Weinstein tells the group. “We don't have to revert to Giuliani policing, but we also can't just throw up our hands and do nothing.”

Closing the panel, Mo says he believes Farhadian Weinstein “could bring a sea change to the Manhattan D.A., to the whole culture of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.” After all, he adds, she lived it herself.

“The letter and the spirit,” Farhadian Weinstein answers. “That’s justice, right?”

Originally Appeared on Vogue