Jasmine Ray

Adams’s girlfriend when he was Brooklyn borough president, he appointed her his sports czar, a newly created position with a $160,000 salary. She then wrote a book about their relationship. 

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In December 2022, Eric Adams hired Jasmine Ray, the founder of the United States Wall Ball Association as well as the head of a child care center in Brooklyn and former member of the R&B group MVP, to be the director of the newly created Mayor’s Office of Sports, Wellness and Recreation, a position with a $161,410 annual salary. 

As the Adams administration’s “sports czar,” Ray would work “oversee the creation and implementation of sports and wellness initiatives to build a healthier and more active city for all New Yorkers,” according to the press release announcing her hire. 

Ray, Adams wrote, would bring a “deep passion” to her role as well as “a wealth of experience,” and he was “proud” to have her join his administration. 

As the Daily News reported, however, her appointment to the six-figure position had required some wrangling—Adams had had to ask the City’s Conflict of Interest Board for a waiver for Ray to allow her to keep consulting for the daycare center where she’d been employed (and which received City funding) while also working for the Mayor’s Office. Mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia had this to say about the waiver: Ray’s “ability to lead her office while continuing to serve youth outside of her public capacity is proof that City employees with additional jobs can be and are effective while still making good-use of taxpayer dollars,” she told the Daily News.

What wasn’t disclosed at the time? That years earlier, when the mayor was Brooklyn borough president, she and Adams (who is 22 years older than Ray) had had a romantic relationship—a relationship that was only publicly revealed when Ray wrote a tell-all memoir, “Political Humanity,” of her time with Adams, which was published in 2025. 

According to Ray, the two first met at the Barclays Center in 2014, when Adams walked into her private suite at the arena. She pitched putting a handball wall behind Brooklyn Borough Hall, and he said yes, and gave her his number. Soon enough, they began dating, seeing each other “probably every day,” Ray told the podcast “The Beat 139.” On one of their dates, Adams shut down the restaurant Forno Rosso to romance her one-on-one, she said.

According to Ray’s podcast interview, both were dating others at the same time, and the relationship only turned physical after 15 months: “He waited.” 

It’s unclear if their eight-month relationship overlapped with the time that Adams began dating his current partner, Tracey Collins. (“Only Eric can answer that question,” Ray replied when we asked.) Ray and Adams’s relationship ended in 2016 when Adams dumped her at his office in Borough Hall, she said on “The Beat 139.” He explained to her that he had to, as she put it, “pursue this thing” (possibly run for mayor of New York City). Ray told Hell Gate that in a three-hour conversation, Adams told her, “I’m going to protect you from this thing.” She accepted the news, got engaged to someone else, moved to Pennsylvania, and had a baby. After he was elected, he reached out, and soon she had a job in his administration. They also, according to Ray, tried to “rekindle” their relationship around that time, but as she told the New York Times, “the spark was gone.” (Not gone, though? Tracey Collins.)

John Kaehny of the government watchdog group Reinvent Albany told the New York Daily News that the mayor should have told the COIB that he had been romantically involved with Ray before she was hired. Adams’s spokesperson countered that Ray was just an ex-girlfriend when she was appointed, not a family member. When asked by interviewer Ziwe in late October 2025 whether Adams gave Ray a job because “she was your ex-shorty,” he denied it, saying it’s not wrong to hire someone he had “hung out with” years ago. He employed her “because she was good at her job and she did it well,” Adams said. Through her publicist, we asked Ray if she thought she should have disclosed her prior relationship with Adams before being hired. Her one-word answer: “No.”

While in her role as his “sports czar,” Ray invoked her title to contradict the City’s policies on trans inclusion in school sports. “To those asking about my position, as Director of NYC Sports & Rec, I stand with the recent executive order reinforcing the importance of fairness in women’s sports,” Ray wrote in an Instagram post in February 2025, according to Gothamist. Ray, who was referring to a President Donald Trump executive order on trans inclusion in sports, later called that post an “error in judgement” and deleted it.

And they remained close enough during Adams’s mayoralty that when he was indicted on federal corruption charges at the end of 2024, Ray said she was subpoenaed by federal agents four times. Why? Because, she wrote in her memoir, she was on a list of people that had frequent contact on the phone with him.

As recently as October 2025, Ray didn’t deny she still had feelings for the man she calls “E.” In the interview with “The Beat 139,” Ray said she’d be “kidding” herself if she said she didn’t still love him. When asked by the interviewer if Adams loved her, too, she shot back: “Let’s ask him, let me call him.” The mayor didn’t pick up. 

Ray is still in her ex-flame’s corner, though. Adams, she told us, is “fantastic and should be on his way to serving his second term,” she told us via her publicist. 

But it appears Ray is moving on. At the end of October, she posted on Facebook that she’s turning “Political Humanity” into a script. “God always has a plan that is bigger than our imagination,” she wrote.

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