On Tuesday, in an interview with the editorial board of the Staten Island Advance, Congressman Michael Grimm from New York responded to a small portion of “The Mark,” the article I wrote for this week’s issue. He called it “fiction,” “a witch hunt,” and “a hatchet job” perpetrated in part by the Democratic Party. Much of Grimm’s substantive response mirrored what was included in the original story. But he also supplied additional statements, which include one documented error and other information contradicted by my reporting on the incident.

The part of the article Grimm referenced involved an incident in July, 1999, at a night club called Caribbean Tropics, in Queens. At the time, Grimm was an agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer named Gordon Williams, who was working at the nightclub, says that just after midnight Grimm entered with a woman. The woman’s estranged husband, who happened to be at the club, heatedly confronted Grimm. Williams helped separate the pair, for which Grimm thanked him. Williams recalls that Grimm then told him that the husband “don’t know who he’s fucking with … I’ll fuckin’ make him disappear where nobody will find him.” (Grimm has denied saying this.) Grimm, the woman, and the estranged husband all left the club. The story describes what Williams says happened next:

Around 2:30 A.M., there was a commotion on the dance floor. According to Williams, somebody was shouting, “He’s got a gun!” Following a crowd into the club’s garage, Williams discovered that Grimm and the husband had returned, and Grimm was holding a weapon. Grimm was “carrying on like a madman,” Williams said. “He’s screaming, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him.’ So I said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He put the gun back in his waist and said, ‘I’m a fucking F.B.I. agent, ain’t nobody gonna threaten me.’ ”

(Grimm, as noted in the article, denied having made the statement, saying, “I don’t need to speak that way. A guy with a gun who knows how to use it doesn’t need to say anything.”) According to Williams’s account, Grimm then left the night club again. My story then describes Williams’s account of Grimm returning to the club a third time:

Grimm left the club, but at 4 A.M., just before the club closed, he returned again, according to Williams, this time with another F.B.I. agent and a group of N.Y.P.D. officers. Grimm had told the police that he had been assaulted by the estranged husband and his friends. Williams said that Grimm took command of the scene, and refused to let the remaining patrons and employees leave. “Everybody get up against the fucking wall,” Williams recalled him saying. “The F.B.I. is in control.” Then Grimm, who apparently wanted to find the man with whom he’d had the original altercation, said something that Williams said he’ll never forget: “All the white people get out of here.”

Another former N.Y.P.D. officer at the night club, Nirmilla Jitta, confirmed that it was Grimm who “forced everyone to stay in the club, saying that he was an FBI agent,” and that “he was the one that was doing all the talking.” Another witness also confirmed this aspect of the incident. Gordon Williams later filed a lawsuit for slander in Queens, which was shifted to federal court after Grimm’s defense attorney—a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office—argued that Grimm was “acting within the scope of his duties” at the club. Williams and Jitta both say they were never interviewed by the F.B.I. Williams says that witnesses were afraid to come forward to support him against the F.B.I., and he was told by an N.Y.P.D. union lawyer that he should consider his employment future were he to pursue the lawsuit. He didn’t respond to federal filings and the suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. The U.S. Attorney argued that Williams had not filed a official claim form, “nor any other notification of claim,” registering accusations against the F.B.I. (In Grimm’s account to the Staten Island Advance he notes that Williams “sent a letter to the Attorney General of the United States” making the allegations.)

Most of Grimm’s statements to the Advance echo what he told me, both in his office (before abruptly ending our interview, saying that “you don’t rate to come and question me on it, quite frankly”), and later in a letter sent to The New Yorker in response to fact-checking questions. Grimm says he only entered the club once near closing time and was jumped by the husband and several of his friends. To the Advance, he added the detail that “the altercation left ‘three of the four on the floor.’ ” As noted in my story, he said he did not brandish his gun, but merely moved it from his ankle holster to his waist band, “because the bouncers didn’t exactly look friendly.”