Claim:
An image shared in November 2025 authentically showed a headline stating that lawyer Alan Dershowitz said he would “blow his brains out on live TV” if Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.
Rating:
In November 2025, social media users shared a purported headline claiming that lawyer and retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said he would “blow his brains out on live TV” if Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who ran as a Democrat, defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa on Nov. 4 to become the city’s first Muslim mayor.
The alleged headline mimicked the design of New York Post article and listed a publish date of July 19, 2025.
Multiple Snopes readers searched our website to find out whether the headline was legitimate.
However, the headline was fake. Snopes found no record of Dershowitz, who once represented convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and helped with U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense, making the statement attributed to him. Dershowitz also denied ever saying it.
A Google search found no credible news reports supporting the claim about Dershowitz. Instead, it returned a Lead Stories fact check debunking the rumor. If Dershowitz really said he’d “blow his brains out on live TV” if Mamdani won, reputable media outlets likely would have reported it.
In an X post shared on Nov. 5, Dershowitz also confirmed he never made such a statement and called the headline “fake.” He added that he would “continue to oppose” what he called Mamdani’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel bigotry,” but with his “brains intact.”
A fake headline is circulating saying that I promised ” to blow my brains out on live tv” if Mamdani wins. I will contribute $180 ( chai) to Mamdani’s reelection campaign if anyone can show I actually said it. I did not. I will continue to oppose Mayor Mamdani’s anti semitic and…
— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) November 5, 2025
The fake headline appeared to be a doctored version of a genuine New York Post article dated July 19, 2025. A search for the authors and publication date in the fake headline led to a legitimate New York Post article (archived) with a headline that read, “Andrew Cuomo says he ‘will move to Florida’ if Zohran Mamdani becomes NYC mayor.” Both the fake headline and the real article shared the same timestamp: 3:31 p.m. ET.
At a Hamptons breakfast hosted by supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis, Cuomo reportedly said, “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida. God forbid!” His campaign later insisted he was joking, according to the New York Post article.
For further reading, we investigated a rumor claiming that a screen at New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s headquarters was hacked with a message that read, “Trump is your president.”
