Accused Brooklyn Temple Vandal Was Christine Quinn's Intern

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK -- The man who scrawled "Die Jew rats" in a Prospect Heights synagogue last week was once an intern for then-City Council speaker Christine Quinn, who gave him the opportunity after he'd been kicked out of his home for being gay.

James Polite, 26, stands accused of covering the walls Union Temple with anti-Semitic messages Thursday night just before "Broad City" star Ilana Glazer was slated to host a political event, police said.

Hours after police announced Polite's arrest, Quinn took to Twitter to express her support for the Jewish community and the sadness she felt for a young man she once tried to help.

"I know this young man," Quinn wrote, "and have done everything I could over the years to help him as he grew up in and out of the foster system, in and out of the mental health system, and in and out of homelessness."

"The actions he is accused of break my heart," Quinn added. "And while he has experienced hardship that most people can't ever imagine, his actions are inexcusable."

Polite first made headlines in 2013 when the then-city council intern was the subject of a DNAinfo profile in which he described being kicked out of his home at the age of 13 because he was gay.

The young intern told reporters his mother told him he "deserved to be disowned," but that Quinn stepped up and helped him pursue a dream of working in politics.

“I needed a distraction,” Polite said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to do this Obama thing. I’m going to get food that they feed you at the campaign.’"

“We’ve kind of adopted him as our little brother at the City Council,” Quinn said at the time. “I would always say to him, ‘You have to go to college. It doesn’t matter to me which college you go to, but you have to go to college.’”

Quinn helped Polite secure a place at Brandeis University, but his troubled past caught up with him and he began smoking marijuana to cope with an undiagnosed behavioral disorder, he told the New York Times in 2017.

Polite was placed on a health leave of absence in 2015 so that he could enter a rehabilitation program, where doctors finally diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, according to the Times.

At the time, Polite said he'd returned to Brandeis and hoped to work with foster children after graduation.

“When you’re in foster care, you don’t see a lot of others in the system making it,” he said. “And so I’m going to be the person there who can say, ‘I was able to make it, so you can do it, too.’”

Polite has yet to be arraigned on the criminal mischief as a hate crime and graffiti charges stemming from Thursday's vandalism because he remains in the hospital, a spokesperson from the Brooklyn District Attorney's office told Patch.

His alleged attack on the Union Temple is one of a mounting number of anti-Semitic hate crimes to occur in Brooklyn in the days following the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre that left 11 people dead.

Photo of James Polite courtesy of the NYPD and of Christine Quinn courtesy of Spencer Platt/Getty Images