An openly gay Democratic socialist, Marc Fliedner’s bid to unseat Cyrus Vance is a long shot. But that hasn’t stopped him from building an unlikely following

One of the few people to be ensnared in scandals with both the Trump clan and Harvey Weinstein is the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance.

Two separate recent reports in the New Yorker have revealed that as DA, Vance declined to prosecute alleged corruption by Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr, or an alleged sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein (the later despite a compelling audio sting).

The DA had received campaign donations from lawyers close to Weinstein and the Trumps. Since these stories broke, Vance has returned $31,000 of donations he received from the Trump attorney, but he has defended his decision not to indict Weinstein – without returning tens of thousands in donations.

And yet, even as Vance is under fire from the right and left, he will probably be re-elected to a third term on 7 November– because he is running unopposed.

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Enter Brooklynite Marc Fliedner.

A Democrat socialist and the first openly gay man to run for DA anywhere, Fliedner was inspired to run as a write-in candidate after someone suggested it on Twitter.

At a press conference on Tuesday morning, Fliedner stood outside Vance’s lower Manhattan office wearing a purple tie for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

There, the onetime prosecutor of sex crimes railed against what he called the “pay-to-play” ethics of Vance not indicting Weinstein. He also accepted the personal endorsements of both Curtis Sliwa, the red beret wearing member of the safety patrols group Guardian Angels and chairman of New York’s Reform party, and Glenn Cantave, a young member of the Black Lives Matter network.

The role of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not to seek to lock up every single person the NYPD puts in cuffs Marc Fliedner

The gathering probably marked the only time members of the Reform party, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Socialists of America have all supported the same candidate, and Cantave gave an impassioned testimony about how Fliedner, as a private civil rights attorney, helped the young black man evade a huge fine for protesting for racial justice.

Fliedner came to the attention of Black Lives Matter at the end of his decade of working in the Brooklyn DA’s office, after the tragic shooting of Akai Gurley by NYPD officer Peter Liang.

“I was the guy who responded to the crime scene in the middle of the night, because I was the chief of the civil rights division,” he told the Guardian. “I disagreed with the recommendation that Liang get no jail time,” which his boss overruled. Fliedner left that job not long after, and Liang walked.

Earlier this year, Fliedner ran for DA in Brooklyn, coming in third in the Democratic primary – which isn’t so bad, considering he had become a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest DA Cyrus Vance. Reports revealed Vance declined to prosecute allegations against Weinstein, as well as Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Photograph: Branden Camp/AP

Democratic Socialism has “a stigma that sounds anti-American to folks,” Fliedner admits. “But I did the homework when Bernie Sanders was running.” His 25-year-old son told him these were his values and when he went to meetings, he realised this was the place for him.

In addition to its platform about “racial equality, and LGBTQ equality, and disability equality,” Fliedner thinks the party offers an obvious alternative to the ways “capitalism run amok”.

But can a prosecutor defend racial justice when the criminal justice system is so inherently anti-black?

“The role of the prosecutor is to seek justice,” Fliedner says, “not to seek to lock up every single person the NYPD puts in cuffs.”

If he were elected, he wouldn’t mind “saying no to prosecuting everything the NYPD might want us to prosecute. That’s why, I when I talk about ‘broken windows,’ my concerns are primarily about how it punishes poverty and disproportionately punishes people of color.”

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He also says he would create a Civil Disobedience Case Review Bureau. “We’d be on call, so that if there were large gatherings that result in arrest, we’d immediately screen them to see if the arrests were appropriate … and make it expedient so that people who are trying to assert their first and fourth amendment rights are not criminalized.”

As a gay man running to head the municipal criminal justice system which tried to suppress the Stonewall riots, he says he doesn’t have a romantic idea of the relationship between the LGBT community and the criminal justice system. Rather, “what most concerns me most are those members of the LGBT community – mostly the ‘T’, frankly – who need a commitment that they’re getting the support they need. And especially trans people of color. And especially trans women of color.”

Fieldner’s odds are long. Incumbent Manhattan DAs do not change often (Vance’s predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, served for 34 years). And, though the Brooklyn resident is moving to Manhattan before election day so that he could legally become DA if he wins, he will not be allowed to vote.

Still, he says, he’s happy to answer a call that came from Twitter – especially to see something “positive” come out of a space dominated by the president’s hate “and to give people a choice”.

