Video shows Alfonse D’Amato cursing at wife in hospital bed
Frame grab from cellphone video taken by Katuria D'Amato, the estranged wife of U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, that shows him cursing at her while she was hospitalized last year after neck surgery. Credit: Katuria D’Amato
The estranged wife of former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato has released a cellphone video that shows him cursing at her while she was hospitalized last year after neck surgery.
Katuria D’Amato, 52, an attorney, is in a child custody dispute with the political power broker and lobbyist. The couple are seeking a divorce.
The Lido Beach resident said she released the nearly eight-minute video from March 2017 to show what she says is a pattern of verbal abuse by the former senator.
She and her attorney, Thomas Liotti, said they are seeking to have the video admitted as evidence in the child custody matter. She said her children, who spend four days a week with their father, also are verbally abused by him.
“He always flips out like that on me,” Katuria D’Amato said, referring to the video that she said she recorded when Alfonse D’Amato visited her at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. “It’s now commonplace.”
Alfonse D’Amato’s attorney, Stephen Gassman, said the video “has nothing to do with this trial,” referring to the child custody dispute.
“We are trying the case in the courtroom and they have chosen to try it outside the courtroom. That’s their prerogative. But we will prevail in the courtroom,” Gassman said.
Katuria D’Amato is seen crying in the video, pleading with her husband o to stop “yelling” at her during a dispute she says was about finding a computer password to register their children for baseball.
At one point, Alfonse D’Amato says he is “sick and [expletive] tired of being treated like nothing.”
D’Amato, now 80, also says Katuria D’Amato doesn’t care about him, at one point calling himself an “old [expletive] man you want to get rid of.”
State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Lorintz awarded Alfonse D’Amato temporary custody of the couple’s 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter after the former senator questioned Katuria D’Amato’s mental stability following a Sept. 30 police response to the couple’s former marital home in Lido Beach.
Katuria D’Amato has testified in court that she is mentally stable and has no psychiatric history. She has said the former senator is seeking custody of the children to punish her for filing for divorce.
The couple is due back in court April 11.
