Konst was one of just seven candidates to have raised and spent enough money to appear in Wednesday’s public advocate debate, during which she aggressively attacked the other candidates. | Stefan Jeremiah Who is Nomiki Konst?

Nomiki Konst, the 35-year-old TV pundit casting herself as the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the New York public advocate’s race, readily acknowledges that her background is politically unconventional.

She’s wandered from Tucson to Buffalo to Florida to Los Angeles to New York City, from one cause to the next. It’s all, her aides say, part of a bildungsroman that naturally culminates in a run for an office that’s second in line to the mayor of the biggest city in America.


Like Ocasio-Cortez, Konst has not risen through traditional Democratic channels. She identifies as a Democratic Socialist. Her campaign depicts her as one in a movement of millennial women finding their voices. But for someone campaigning for a job to keep fellow city leaders honest, her own personal history is hard to pin down.

“The last decade and a half have been very tumultuous for millennials,” Konst told POLITICO.

Konst came to POLITICO’s office on Tuesday to discuss her background and her aspirations for the office of public advocate. POLITICO followed up with 19 fact-checking questions that same night. Citing debate preparations, she declined to answer those questions, some simple queries like what year she graduated from college, and how much of her life she spent in Tucson. The campaign ultimately declined to answer many of the questions.

“Given that this election is less than 4 days away, it is simply impossible to accommodate this request on this timeline,” emailed campaign manager Dominique Shuminova on Thursday evening.

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Certain things are clear: She is a sometimes-magnetic TV personality who spent two years roving the country for The Young Turks, an openly ideological news outlet that is, in many ways, the left’s answer to Breitbart.

She can credibly lay claim to being a social media “influencer,” with a robust Twitter following of 84,000. And she has a peripatetic background populated by ventures that have gone bust: from an aborted run to succeed Gabby Giffords in Congress in Arizona, to the founding of a now-defunct Los Angeles civic organization, to the creation of a now-defunct journalism enterprise.

Konst has an uncanny ability to ingratiate herself with influential people, and she is adept at getting herself on TV, where she appears poised and eager to throw rhetorical bombs. She’s demonstrated a Zelig-like ability to appear around insurgent Democratic primary candidates in New York.

In the 17-person race to succeed now-Attorney General Letitia James as public advocate — a race that will be decided in a special election next Tuesday — she also appears to be making some headway.

In the last month, Konst has raised more money than the other candidates, bringing in more than $80,000 in donations. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s press secretary has donated to her. So have Susan Sarandon and Rosario Dawson. Renee Cafaro — a progressive heir to a real estate development fortune and a former aide to former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and former Gov. David Paterson — hosted a fundraiser for Konst at her Plaza Hotel spread earlier this year.

“She has a real grassroots feel to her, which I love,” Cafaro said.

Konst’s campaign manager helped state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi defeat Independent Democratic Conference leader Jeff Klein in 2018.

And Konst was one of just seven candidates to have raised and spent enough money to appear in Wednesday’s public advocate debate, during which she aggressively attacked the other candidates, accusing them of taking donations from real estate developers. She even suggested that NY1 moderator Errol Louis, who threatened to cut her mic after interrupting other candidates, was trying to “silence women.” (Louis didn’t cut the mic as he did for Bo Dietl in the 2017 mayoral debate.)

“I think the people who come from our side of the left kind of organize quietly,” Konst said. “And then sometimes the establishment doesn’t necessarily see what’s happening.”

The Nomiki Konst story begins in Tucson, where she was born. She moved to Buffalo with her family when she was eight. Her mom was an Erie County legislator. Konst attended Nichols School, a private prep school in Buffalo.

Much of the rest of her life remains occluded by imprecision.

Konst says she attended the University of Arizona but declined to say if she graduated. Inquiries to the university were not returned.

She was also briefly an actor and says she was an Obama organizer. In news articles and television appearances over the past decade, she has been described using more than 30 different titles, from “former blogger” to “film industry activist” to “pro-Sanders journalist.”

She founded Alliance Hollywood, an organization whose mission was, according to an archived version of its website, to act as “the voice of entertainment on Capitol Hill.” Konst’s LinkedIn page says she founded it in 2007. In an interview, Konst said “2009, I believe.” The organization no longer exists.

“I’m really bad with dates,” she said Tuesday.

By 2011, the organization was describing itself as “a DC non-profit corporation.” POLITICO has been unable to find evidence that the organization registered as a nonprofit. Konst’s campaign declined to provide any documentation either. Nor would she say where the group's funding came from. Neither did she say what it did, aside from the handful of events documented on its Flickr page.

In 2011, Konst says she moved to New York City.

“I think I’ve lived in over 12 apartments [since then],” she said.

Since 2011, however, she has also lived in Arizona. In 2012, she started showing up in Tucson papers as a candidate to succeed Gabby Giffords after a gunman shot the congresswoman.

“I really don’t know any other home other than Tucson,” Konst said at the time.

She failed to make the ballot. More recently she disputed that she really ran for the seat, both in the interview with POLITICO and at a debate among the candidates running for public advocate this week, where she was asked by another candidate how she could call herself an outsider candidate if she had run for Congress before.

“I was never on the ballot. I did not run,” Konst said.

At some point after her Congressional bid, she returned to New York and got involved in the ultimately successful campaign to ban fracking here.

Josh Fox, the anti-fracking filmmaker who made "Gasland", says they met in 2011, at a party in Los Angeles for his Oscar-nominated documentary.

“Nomi was there because she was working on fracking, working on those issues,” he said. Fox said he met her again in 2013, on the anti-fracking campaign, and then again when both served on the Democratic National Convention's platform committee. Konst also served on "Unity Reform Commission,” established in the aftermath of the 2016 Democratic primary, in an effort to restore faith in the DNC’s nomination process and management.

Around 2013, Konst says she founded the Accountability Project, an attempt at a local nonprofit investigative journalism outlet, with the late journalist Wayne Barrett, whom she has frequently referred to as a “mentor.” (Her LinkedIn profile says the project began in 2012 and lasted two years).

“Wayne had trained me,” Konst told POLITICO. “He taught me everything about investigative reporting. We would sit there for hours in his living room.”

Barrett ended up getting sick, ultimately dying in 2017. Funding dried up. The Accountability Project shuttered. Several people who spoke with POLITICO said Konst and Barrett did work together on the project and Barrett recommended reporters for Konst to hire. Barrett’s widow, Fran, declined comment, citing her work for Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“That was probably where I learned the greatest tricks from the most recent greatest investigative reporter of our time, Wayne Barrett, who I was very close to,” she said in a recent interview with Gotham Gazette’s Ben Max and City Limits’ Jarrett Murphy.

But in an interview with POLITICO, Konst clarified that she did not do reporting for the Accountability Project. She describes herself as an “investigative reporter,” because of her work for The Young Turks.

Konst could point to two pieces The Accountability Project produced — a heavily disputed article about the former head of an anti-corruption body Cuomo created in 2013, and another about Bronx party bosses. She also hosted an apparently short-lived but “big deal” podcast for the project. A Soundcloud page for the podcast shows just five episodes. She declined to disclose how many subscribers it had or how many episodes it produced.

Konst frequently argues that the Public Advocate’s office needs someone with her investigative skills.

Steven Weiss, a reporter and a former Wayne Barrett intern who worked with Konst on the Accountability Project, said he was impressed with Konst’s work and her managerial skills.

“I do know that Wayne Barrett thought well of her, spent at least dozens of hours with or speaking to her, and recommended her to others he cared for and respected, as the manager of that process and organization,” Weiss said.

But, he added, "As to her claim of being an investigative journalist, specifically, and whether Wayne would agree with that characterization of her work, I've not seen or heard anything that would suggest that she was, or that he would."

Konst says that it was while touting the Accountability Project on TV that she gained steam as a talking head. By 2015, she was making frequent appearances on CBS and Fox News as a Democratic political strategist and expert on national politics, particularly on fighting within the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential primary. For the most part, the television appearances were unpaid, she told POLITICO.

At various points along the way, Konst said she also campaigned to draft Joe Biden for president and joined the Truman Center, which advocates for “tough, smart national security solutions,” according to its website.

Though Konst has touted her role as a “partner” at the organization in her Young Turks profile and her Huffington Post bio, on Tuesday she said that her role there, as well as her membership in the New Leaders Council, were meaningless.

Partners at the Center write their own online profiles, according to Truman Center spokesperson Graham West, and Konst’s said she was also the group’s West Coast Managing Director of Partnerships. That bio has since been deleted.

“We don't have any records of [that job] ever existing,” said another Truman Center spokesperson Ryan Cahill, though his colleague West noted that, “Nomiki's involvement at Truman essentially predates the employment of everyone currently on staff given organizational turnover." Her membership, Cahill added, has lapsed.

“That was literally something that was killed in like three days,” Konst said, referring to the West Coast Managing Director of Partnerships position.

“It literally means nothing,” she said Tuesday. “If there’s any way for me to explain it to you, these organizations are nothing. They just basically go around the country and try to get young people involved and come to their conferences.”

She says she worked in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, but one day after POLITICO asked her for details on that particular claim, she had yet to provide any.

For the past two years, Konst worked at The Young Turks, where she filed dispatches from Flint, Mich., Puerto Rico post-hurricane Maria, and East Chicago, until she was laid off in June of 2018. While working for the Young Turks, she says she was bombed in the Dakotas, amid protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“I was at Standing Rock in the water when there were like bombs being thrown at us, literally, where a woman got her arm ripped off and she still is paralyzed in one arm,” she said, in possible reference to protester Sophia Wilansky, whose arm was damaged by shrapnel of indeterminate origin.

She also hosted a radio show called “The Filter” on SiriusXM.

She describes herself on her campaign website as an “award-winning investigative journalist.” Asked to specify, her campaign said she participated in a Citizens Union panel entitled, “Recognizing New York Journalists Who Make Democracy Work,” after which she and other panelists were awarded glass apples with their names on them.

After leaving The Young Turks last summer, she worked for Our Revolution, the non-profit 501c4 organization started by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders after his 2016 campaign for president.

Konst said there was no overlap between her employment by The Young Turks, for which she earned $42,000 in salary last year, and her employment by Our Revolution, which paid her $36,000, according to a disclosure form she filed with the City’s Conflicts of Interest Board. She says she’s now getting by on savings. On her income disclosure form, she identified herself as a self-employed journalist.

As a reporter for The Young Turks, Konst sometimes interviewed politicians whose campaigns she publicly supported, or activists whose political positions she openly agreed with. But Konst sees no dissonance between her political activism and her journalism.

“Politico was founded by Republicans,” Konst said. “The New York Times invented this in the late 1800s, invented this concept of non-partisan. And it was actually a PR stunt.”

POLITICO spokesperson Brad Dayspring said that is not accurate.

“POLITICO has been owned by Robert Allbritton since its launch 12 years ago. Robert is politically independent, or as he would say, ‘fiercely independent,’“ Dayspring said. “Robert’s editorial co-founders were John Harris and Jim VandeHei. John is currently POLITICO’s editor-in-chief and is also an Independent. While no longer with POLITICO, Jim VandeHei is, by all accounts, also an independent and advocated for a 3rd party candidate in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2016.”

Konst says she first voted in a New York City election, at earliest, in 2016. City Board of Elections records indicate she first registered to vote in the 2018 fall primary elections in New York City, but her ballot was rejected on a technicality. She successfully cast her first vote in New York City in the general election in November 2018.

“I understand that people like to bring that up as a criticism of me, but at the end of the day, a lot of people who have been in office for a very long time have rezoned their neighborhoods and made it completely unaffordable to live in their neighborhoods,” she said. “And I think that’s more of an abomination, in terms of civics.”

Konst said she wasn’t registered to vote in New York City during the 2013 mayoral elections, for example, because she thought her vote might count more in a place like Arizona, a purple state.

In the event she’s elected, Konst would not be the first public advocate to struggle with accuracy. Tish James was known to misstate her age and falsely claimed to have a role in helping the New York Times report a story about a young homeless girl named Dasani.

Konst’s vision for public advocate is undeniably ambitious. She wants to decentralize the office, so there’s a deputy in every borough. She thinks the city’s Department of Investigation should be relocated under the auspices of public advocate. She wants to change the law so that the public advocate is no longer second in line to the mayor.

“Fundamentally, how can you be an actual ombudsman for the city, if you’re so connected to the political structures of the city?” Konst asked.