Deputy mayor arrested before resigning

The deputy mayor with authority over New York City's police department, fire department and emergency response coordination was arrested on a domestic violence charge shortly before he resigned last month.

Stephen Goldsmith, then-deputy mayor for operations, shoved his wife into a kitchen counter, threw a phone hard enough to break it and grabbed her when she threatened him and then said she was calling police, according to a Washington, D.C., police report. The details of the July 30 altercation were first reported in the New York Post Thursday.

"I should have put a bullet through you years ago," Margaret Goldsmith told her husband before the argument got physical, the police report said. After he shoved her, she told him: "[You're] not going to do this to me again, I'm calling the police," according to the report, which said she escaped his grasp and called police from another room in their Washington, D.C., home.

Margaret Goldsmith declined medical attention at the scene and later denied the police account. Prosecutors haven't pursued charges.

"Although Margaret under oath has affirmed the absence of violence and my actual innocence, I offered my resignation in order not to be a distraction to the mayor and his important agenda for the city," Stephen Goldsmith said in a statement Thursday jointly issued with his wife.

"There has never been any kind of domestic assault or violence in our marriage," his wife said in the statement. "The police report is a summary of what discussions occurred that evening in our home, and those comments have been misconstrued as well as taken out of context."

Marc LaVorgna, spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said "it was clear to the mayor and Mr. Goldsmith that he could no longer serve at City Hall, regardless of his guilt or innocence." LaVorgna also said the mayor's office had "nothing to add to Mrs. Goldsmith's account of the incident."

Yesterday, city officials called on the mayor to disclose what members of his administration knew about the arrest before it became public.

"The mayor and his staff should give a full accounting of what they knew and when they knew it," Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said in a statement. " 'No comment' is not an acceptable response."