Democratic socialist and Brooklyn state senator Julia Salazar was allegedly supporting herself with money from a trust fund during her 2018 campaign.
Reports allege Salazar filed hand-written campaign finance papers that valued the trust fund at $10 million. However, she claims the figures were made in error, the New York Post reports.
Salazar allegedly classified the amount as “Category DDDDD,” which is code for “$10 million or more,” but said she misread the paperwork and thought it said “$10,000 and over,” not “10,000,000 and over.”
“I looked at it in a cursory way,” she told reporters Thursday. “I mistook the comma versus the decimal point, so it added it extra zeros.”
However, Salazar reportedly did not misread the next line of the paperwork, and listed her income as a community organizer for Jews for Racial + Economic Justice as “Category E,” or $20,000-$50,000.
The 27-year-old also received critcism in 2018 for allegedly claiming to have Jewish heritage, Breitbart News reported.
“I am a Jew of color. I am a Colombian, American, but I am also Jewish… I immigrated to this country with my family when I was very little from Colombia,” she said at a campaign event.
Salazar’s brother told Tablet that this claim was not true. “There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish … my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish,” he said.
Salazar reportedly converted to Judaism in 2012, but none of her family are of Jewish descent.
Salazar also allegedly claimed that she was born in Colombia, but it was later confirmed that she was born in Miami, Florida.
“We were very much middle class. We had a house in Jupiter along the river, it was in a beautiful neighborhood,” Salazar’s brother, Alex, told City & State New York. “I feel very strongly about my family and I want to tell the truth.”
Breitbart News reported in September that Salazar is an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America and also worked for Cynthia Nixon’s failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign in New York.