Earlier this month, a Maryland state senator was indicted for allegedly blackmailing a former consultant with secretly recorded video of her in bed with a married man. Dalya Attar — a Democrat and the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland senate — is charged with eight counts, including extortion and conspiracy. Her brother, Joseph Attar, and Baltimore Police Department officer Kalman Finkelstein are also charged in the alleged scheme.
According to the federal indictment that was unsealed Thursday and obtained by The Cut, Attar had worked with the unnamed political consultant in 2018 while she was first running for the Maryland House of Delegates, but their relationship soured sometime before the election. Attar went on to win the election, but in 2020, as she was preparing for her 2022 reelection campaign, she allegedly texted one of the co-conspirators that the consultant was “still looking to screw me badly” — at which point the scheme began to take shape.
Knowing the consultant was staying at an apartment owned by a relative of Finkelstein’s, the three allegedly plotted to plant recording devices disguised as smoke detectors in the home, from which they obtained footage of the consultant in bed with a married man. In text messages, Attar allegedly said they planned to use the video as blackmail to hurt the consultant’s daughters’ matchmaking prospects. “She wants her daughters to get married more than she wants to screw me,” she apparently texted to one of the co-conspirators in March 2021.
In December 2021, Attar’s brother allegedly met with the married man, and he apparently told him they had “hours of footage” of him in bed with the consultant and advised him to tell the consultant to “leave Dalya alone.” (It’s unclear if the married man was involved in the disagreement between Attar and her consultant or just got caught in the crossfire.) The brother allegedly threatened to “share this video with everybody you know, everyone she knows, every rabbi in town, your kids, your wife, her daughters.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, Attar claimed the charges against her center on “the allegations of my former disgruntled employee,” adding that “we have yet to see any tangible evidence to support the claim that I knew of any illegal actions taken on my behalf. I look forward to sharing my side of the story, and believe the truth will be the arbiter of justice. In the meantime, I will continue to serve my community with humility and honor, and look forward to being as transparent as possible.”
A spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department told The Cut they were aware of the charges against Finkelstein, and that he was “previously assigned to administrative duties” but his “police powers were suspended in 2022 in pursuant to Maryland State Law.”