NEW JERSEY’S PALISADE PARK MAYOR FORCED TO APOLOGIZE FOR MOTHER’S GAFFE
Sometimes people really put their foot in their mouths and chow down. But then they chew. Sometimes someone close to you does it for you in public and you have to choke for quite a while. You might not even survive if you’re a politician. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens with New Jersey’s Palisade Park mayor James Rotundo. His 80-year-old mother, Lorraine Rotundo, posted a comment on Facebook about how she wanted to leave the town because of its large Asian population. She was angry hearing locals speaking Korean. The problem? About half the people in town are Korean. Thanks for the gaffe, mom!
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MOTHER INSULTED KOREANS IN TOWN, BUT KOREANS MAKE UP 50% OF TOWN!
Lorraine Rotundo initially posted, “Go to hell PALISADES PARK, let the GD KOREANS have this F’n town. All of us AMERICANS are so done. I am going to suggest that only English be spoken in our Boro Hall at least while an AMERICAN is still the mayor.” But she wasn’t done. She continued, “Any American working there has no idea what is going on because Korean is mostly spoken there, not English.” She then apologized to her son but was unrepentant, saying, “as your mom (I)
cannot be quiet.”
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MAYOR ROTUNDO FORCED TO APOLOGIZE, EVEN AS PRIMARY VOTES SHOW HIM LOSING TO KOREAN-AMERICAN
Mayor Rotundo, for his part, claimed in a post that he’d never known his mother to be racist. He might want to take Fox News off her cable access. He wrote, “Yesterday my 80 year old mother, who I love dearly, put up a very inappropriate Facebook message that she sincerely regrets. She has apologized and retracted her statement. I have never heard my mom talk like this before and I believe her when she says she is mortified and did not mean these hurtful things.” His public triage continued, saying he is “proud to represent all of the people of Palisades Park and I respect our Korean residents and all people.”
MAYOR ROTUNDO LOSES PRIMARY, IRONY IS MORE THAN A 4-IRON
But here’s the background. Lorraine posted the comments just after a very tight primary where her son was down in the count by 18 votes to a Korean-American councilman, Christopher Chung. At the time, election officials still had roughly 100 provisional ballots to count. Chung won, Rotundo lost.
