A day care operator who had been the romantic partner of former Mayor Eric Adams has been accused of failing to pay the center’s rent for as long as two years and possibly misusing public money, leading the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani to sever its contract with the facility.
Officials at the New York City Department of Education in May informed Jasmine Ray, the operator of the Cornerstone Day Care Center in Brooklyn, that they would not renew the facility’s $933,000 annual contract when it expires at the end of June. The termination came after the discovery of the unpaid rent and potentially unreasonable costs at the center, including the $80,000 consulting fee that Ms. Ray earned as executive director at the same time that she held a $160,000-a-year job in the Adams administration.
Ms. Ray had received a waiver from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board under Mr. Adams to hold two publicly funded positions, but the Education Department suggested that she had violated its terms. The waiver limited her employment at Cornerstone, where she has worked since 2017, to 10 hours a week and required her to relinquish her title of executive director.
Yet, the department said, she kept her title while the day care’s financial statements say that her compensation increased. At the same time, she served in her full-time job as New York City’s first director of the Mayor’s Office of Sports, Wellness and Recreation.
Elisheba Lewi, the Education Department’s chief procurement officer, wrote in a March 31 letter that the center had “charged D.O.E. a substantial sum for Ms. Ray’s consulting services.”
Ms. Lewi listed several concerns, including the whereabouts of rent money provided by the Education Department that Cornerstone’s landlord said it had never received. A housing court judge recently ordered Cornerstone to vacate its property by Aug. 31 because of nonpayment.
The Education Department told Ms. Ray last month that it would not take further action because her contract was not being renewed. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said it has not received a complaint about Ms. Ray.
Ms. Ray disputed the Education Department’s allegations and insisted that she had done nothing wrong.
She said that Cornerstone was up-to-date on rent. She described her $80,000 salary as a fee for “executive-level real estate acquisition, lease negotiation, construction procurement, architectural coordination and legal advisory services” for the center’s possible move. The day care has not moved, and the Education Department previously denied Ms. Ray’s request to move the facility.
In an interview, Ms. Ray argued that she had been unfairly singled out and harassed by the Mamdani administration because of her connections to Mr. Adams, who since leaving office has criticized Mr. Mamdani. She also pointed to criticism that she had posted on her website in March doubting the Education Department’s ability to handle an expansion of early childhood programs in the city.
“It is targeting because of my association with Eric Adams,” Ms. Ray, 43, said. “A lot of people can’t stand him, but I’m a supporter of his because I’m a long-term friend of his.”
The mayor’s office did not answer questions about the contract not being renewed.
A little more than a decade ago, Ms. Ray was in a romantic relationship with Mr. Adams that lasted about two years. At the time, Mr. Adams was the Brooklyn borough president, and she ran a handball group she had founded called the U.S. Wall Ball Association.
As mayor, Mr. Adams appointed Ms. Ray in 2022 to the newly created director role at City Hall. Near the end of Mr. Adams’s term last year, Ms. Ray wrote glowingly about the departing mayor and revealed her past relationship with him in a self-published book, “Political Humanity: A Memoir of Love, Legacy and New York City Politics.”
Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, said that it would be inappropriate for him to comment on the dispute involving Ms. Ray, saying that “we are not in a position to speak to the motivations of others.”
Soon after Mr. Adams left City Hall, Ms. Ray said that the day care center started to face additional scrutiny. In February and March, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene dispatched inspectors to Cornerstone on three visits, according to city records.
The first inspector, in mid-February, cited Cornerstone for five violations, four of them considered “critical,” including a malfunctioning fire alarm panel, records show. One was deemed a “public health hazard,” the most severe violation, for a refrigerator with a temperature above 41 degrees. (Ms. Ray said it was at 43 degrees.)
The department routinely inspects day care centers. But Ms. Ray described the visits as excessive and unprecedented during her time at Cornerstone. While the violations aren’t uncommon for day care inspections, the center’s infractions required a follow-up visit to ensure they were fixed. Cornerstone resolved the issues, records show.
Ms. Ray also asserted that some of the violations were actually at an adjacent church that is her landlord. The health department said that the violations were at the day care.
Ms. Ray said she did not believe that the events — the inspections, the March letter, the end of her contract — were coincidence. “If that’s not retaliation, I don’t know what is,” she said.
Cornerstone is among the more than 1,100 community-based organizations that formed a partnership with the Education Department to help operate the city’s early childhood programs for 3- and 4-year-olds. The funding they receive includes money for rent. This school year, Cornerstone has 24 children in 3-K and pre-K.
Cornerstone received a five-year, $4.7 million contract with the Department of Education in 2021, before Mr. Adams took office. Without additional funding, Ms. Ray said that Cornerstone might have to close.
Founded in 1966, Cornerstone is among the oldest day care centers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, taking up the basement and first two floors of a six-story building that opened that same year and is owned by its neighbor, Cornerstone Baptist Church. The church has been a political and spiritual pillar of the neighborhood for more than a century.
The building was opened at a ceremony that included the church’s pastor, the Rev. Sandy F. Ray, who is Ms. Ray’s great-grandfather, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson A. Rockefeller, then New York’s governor.
For the past eight years, Ms. Ray has been in legal battles with the church, which has sued her day care three times over claims of unpaid rent totaling more than $100,000. The center’s rent, $7,077 a month, hasn’t changed since 2015.
Church officials said that Ms. Ray had routinely withheld rent or paid a reduced amount, including in recent months. Ms. Ray said that she has had to redirect rent money toward urgent and costly repairs to the building’s heating system and windows and has paid the center’s utility bills, which were to be covered by the church but were past due and at risk of being shut off; the church said it had never asked her to pay for the utilities or the repairs.
“We had nothing but issues with her,” said Carolyn Aldrick, the former chairwoman of the church’s board of trustees. “She always made excuses for not paying it.”
Parishioners said that the facility had become a financial strain on the church soon after Ms. Ray arrived. Church leaders took their concerns to officials at City Hall and the Education Department during the Adams administration, but were told that they could not intervene, calling it a landlord-tenant dispute.
“Look, the reality is that she was protected by the mayor,” said Errol Louis, an anchor at Spectrum News NY1 and the chairman of the church’s capital campaign committee. “We have money leaking out the backdoor because of a tenant who refuses to honor her obligations.”
Mr. Adams declined to respond to the claim that he had protected her.
As Ms. Ray tells it, she ended up at Cornerstone Day Care Center in 2017 after a former assistant to her great-grandfather told her that the facility belonged to the Ray family. “This is all yours,” Ms. Ray said she was told.
She had no formal training in early childhood education and limited work experience, including a brief stint in 2014 as a bridge toll collector for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. She sued the authority after a few months on the job, claiming that she had been exposed to toxic fumes, court records show. She demanded $1 million in damages.
In an interview, Ms. Ray denied working as a toll collector or suing the authority. But later in the same interview, she acknowledged receiving a settlement, declining to disclose the amount other than describing it as less than her mortgage payment.
Brenda Boyd-Bell, then the center’s interim director and an adviser there for nearly 40 years, said that Ms. Ray showed up unannounced one day and introduced herself as Mr. Ray’s great-granddaughter. She returned again and again until Ms. Ray had persuaded the center’s board to let her lead it, Dr. Boyd-Bell said. (The center’s current board president, Wayne Boyce, declined to comment.)
Soon, Ms. Ray had fired several employees, said Dr. Boyd-Bell, who said she had not been paid about $20,000 in compensation owed to her. Ms. Ray said she did not recall withholding her compensation, but said she did let go of some people, including Dr. Boyd-Bell.
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Lawrence E. Aker III, said that he knew many members of the Ray family but had never met Ms. Ray before 2017. He said that he had been elated that a relative of the church’s founder had wanted to run the day care.
Today, Mr. Aker said that he was looking forward to moving on. So, too, are the parishioners.
Every morning, they join a prayer meeting with Mr. Aker over Zoom. On a recent call, a member asked for prayers on an issue that had been weighing on the church, using shorthand they all recognized: 8/31 — the date when the judge said the day care must vacate the building.
Georgia Gee contributed research.
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