Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and self-described “tough nerd,” knows that for him to win the race for mayor of New York City, Andrew M. Cuomo must fall.

To make that more likely, Mr. Lander decided that his campaign strategy needed an overhaul. He would no longer focus his ire on the increasingly inconsequential mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and his apparent alliance with the Trump administration.

Instead, Mr. Lander, the Park Slope father with the University of Chicago degree, would use his distinctive voice — a singsong lilt that his critics find grating — to try to take down Mr. Cuomo, the former governor leading in the polls.

During a Passover week meal of latkes and matzo ball soup at a restaurant on Montague Street in Brooklyn, Mr. Lander unspooled his indictment of Mr. Cuomo, allegation by allegation.

“I know he looks like a good leader, but actually, you know, he’s just a corrupt chaos agent with an abusive personality that has shown through in every position he’s been in, and that’s dangerous for New York City,” Mr. Lander said, stopping only to spread sour cream and apple sauce on his potato pancake, or to sip from his French 75, a cocktail he likes because it is fizzy.

New Yorkers, he said, deserved a stark alternative: “I am a decent person. Let’s just start there.”

In eight weeks, Democratic primary voters will choose a candidate for mayor, with the victor promptly becoming the favorite to win the November general election in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.

What kind of person New Yorkers want as their mayor is the elemental question of this and any mayor’s race. Do they want someone who projects a muscle-car style of masculinity, like the former governor, who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after an investigation found he had sexually harassed 11 women? (Mr. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing.)

Would they rather a female politician adept at projecting an even-tempered self-confidence, like the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams? Would they prefer a charismatic democratic socialist and son of a movie director from Queens with an age-appropriate aptitude for social media, like Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now polling in second place?

Or would they like Mr. Lander, an earnest-seeming policy wonk who read Antigone in the original Greek; a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who in 2020 said he still considered himself a member, but whose spokeswoman now says hasn’t attended a D.S.A. meeting in decades; a critic of the city-backed financing of the Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s West Side who has since come around; a reform Jew who considered becoming a rabbi, and who is also an anti-occupation Netanyahu critic who cursed Mr. Cuomo in Yiddish as he accused him of wielding antisemitism as a political weapon?

At the moment, it appears that New York City voters are looking elsewhere. Mr. Lander is polling at 6 percent among registered Democratic voters, well behind Mr. Mamdani, a liberal upstart who has energized much of Mr. Lander’s presumptive base. Twenty percent of voters remain undecided. Mayor Adams has opted out of the Democratic primary and will run as an independent in November instead.

Lander partisans note that it is early. At this point in 2021, Andrew Yang was still leading the polls, Mr. Adams was in second place, and Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer, and Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, were polling at 7 and 4 percent, according to a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll from the time.

That June, Ms. Garcia lost to Mr. Adams by just 7,000 votes, Ms. Wiley finished third, and Mr. Yang finished fourth. And Mr. Lander won the Democratic primary for comptroller.

“What I did last time to win was build a coalition that had the Maya Wiley voters, like people that have a more progressive vision of a city that can deliver on affordability, and Kathryn Garcia voters, who just want a good manager who loves New York City,” Mr. Lander said.

“And I believe that coalition still exists and can be a majority of the Democratic primary electorate.”

But first, Mr. Lander said, Mr. Cuomo has to be “knocked down.”

To that end, Mr. Lander has bombarded the press with anti-Cuomo messaging, hoping that something, anything, will stick.

“Lander Demands Cuomo Release His Tax Returns After History of Shady Business and Lies About His Income,” read one news release. “In Addition to Shady Crypto Client, Who Else Has Cuomo Been Paid to Advise Since Resigning as Governor?” read another.

Mr. Lander’s first real political encounter with Mr. Cuomo happened in 2017, when Mr. Lander was the city councilman representing Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Mr. Cuomo was still governor.

Mr. Cuomo effectively killed a New York City law imposing a 5-cent fee on plastic bags that Mr. Lander had sponsored, acting right before it was set to begin. “Plastic bags won,” Mr. Lander said at the time.

Four years after Mr. Lander’s bill passed the City Council, a plastic bag ban signed by Mr. Cuomo went into effect.

“We call that 40 billion plastic bags later,” Mr. Lander said.

More damning, Mr. Lander argues, were the Cuomo administration’s choices during the height of the Covid pandemic, when it directed nursing homes to accept infected patients, and then failed to publicly account for the deaths of more than 4,000 nursing home residents, according to an audit by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Mr. Lander has also tried to highlight the estimated $61 million New York has spent on legal representation related to issues surrounding Mr. Cuomo’s tenure.

“In every relationship, he views it as like, how could I manipulate this other party to my benefit?” Mr. Lander said. “And I really think that’s how he thinks about New York City.”

And so, inevitably, more than an hour into a pro-migrant, pro-trans-rights, pro-Mr. Lander event at a Unitarian church in Brooklyn Heights, Mr. Lander turned to Mr. Cuomo.

He pinned Mr. Cuomo’s polling status on “name recognition in a time of Trumpian distraction” and “pandemic memory repression.” He invoked a former Syracuse mayor, Stephanie Miner, who recently described Mr. Cuomo’s kissing her against her will as a power play. He brought up Covid and the $5 million book deal on which Mr. Cuomo used government resources. He noted that Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer had sought the gynecological records of a woman who had accused him of harassment.

“This is an abusive, corrupt person who is running for his own revenge tour,” Mr. Lander said. “He is not looking to solve the problems of New York City, where he hasn’t lived in 25 years.”

Then Mr. Lander asked the room to sing “Happy Birthday” to his 81-year-old mother, whose celebration he was missing while on the campaign trail. The audience happily complied.

In a statement, Esther Jensen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, described Mr. Lander’s strategy as “bizarre.”

“New Yorkers aren’t naïve,” she said. “They know Governor Cuomo is the only person in this race with the proven record of accomplishment, and leadership necessary to effectively confront the very serious challenges we face, and take on President Trump, which is why these repeated gutter attacks from Brad Lander, a career politician, with no meaningful record or vision of his own, are not only not working, but backfiring.”

Mr. Lander, the 55-year-old son of a St. Louis lawyer and guidance counselor, met his wife at the University of Chicago and moved to New York City in 1992, so she could attend N.Y.U. law school. He found work running a community development corporation and then the Pratt Center for Community Development, both in Brooklyn.

After Mr. Lander announced he would run for mayor, he began tacking toward the center, renouncing the defund the police movement he had once supported and giving a pro-growth speech at a prominent civic association.

The speech won the respect of Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg and a driving force behind New York City’s economic development. “The most important thing is he’s adopted my vision of the pro-growth cycle,” Mr. Doctoroff said of Mr. Lander.

It was a strategy seemingly predicated on the idea that moderates seeking competent governance would coalesce with left-leaning voters behind Mr. Lander.

He has cast himself as a liberal with managerial chops, and a housing expert who promises to end the mental health crisis on city streets and to build apartments on public golf courses. But the left seems more enamored of Mr. Mamdani these days.

In this city of shifting political loyalties, the pendulum may still swing in unexpected ways.

At this point in 2021, Ms. Garcia, who was running on her managerial competence, was a political afterthought. Then she surged forward, winning the endorsements of The New York Times and The Daily News.

Many voters still “want someone who is going to be a good manager,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who formerly led the state party. He added that voters were also looking for someone who could stand up to Mr. Trump.

“Brad Lander has a chance if he can make the case that he can do all of those things,” Mr. Smikle said.

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) died by suicide, according to a statement by the family. She wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in an automobile crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 miles per hour.

In the statement, her family called her “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.”

In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009, Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday.

“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2022 book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.

Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a multimillionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but he relinquished his royal duties in 2019.

In 2021, she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles III of England, contending that he had sexually assaulted her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James, in the Virgin Islands.

A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist. He said he had no memory of the occasion.

After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”

The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.

In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account, she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.

Ms. Giuffre sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015 for calling her a liar; they settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other counts. The verdict was viewed as the legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system, and his victims, by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.

She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes; boarded with an aunt in California; fled to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the former hippie haven; lived on the streets when she was 14; and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker, who abused her.

Compared with living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage several times a day was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”

But her mandate went well beyond those duties, she told the BBC in 2019: She said that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.

In 2002, when she was 19, Ms. Giuffre enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.

The couple had three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated.

He and their children survive her, as do her mother and two brothers, Sky Roberts and Danny Wilson.

Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She explained why she had originally agreed to work as a masseuse for Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and to provide sexual services.

“They seemed like nice people,” she said, “so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused. That was the worst thing I could have told them, because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Hank Sanders contributed reporting.

Reversing a Biden administration position, President Trump’s Justice Department argued that a lawsuit could proceed in Manhattan that accuses a United Nations agency of providing more than $1 billion that helped to enable Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

The lawsuit says that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency allowed Hamas to siphon off the organization’s funds to help build a terrorist infrastructure that included tunneling equipment and weapons that supported the attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage.

The Biden administration argued last year that UNRWA could not be sued because it was part of the United Nations, which enjoys immunity from such lawsuits.

But the Justice Department told a federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday that neither UNRWA nor the agency officials named in the lawsuit were entitled to immunity.

“The complaint in this case alleges atrocious conduct on the part of UNRWA and its officers,” the department wrote in a letter to Judge Analisa Torres of Federal District Court, adding, “The government believes they must answer these allegations in American courts.”

“The prior administration’s view that they do not was wrong,” the department said.

The letter was submitted by Yaakov M. Roth, a senior Justice Department official, and Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

UNRWA, a 75-year-old organization, has been a backbone of humanitarian aid delivery to the two million Palestinians in Gaza.

The U.S. government is not involved in the case against the agency, but the Justice Department, in instances in which it sees a federal interest, can make its views known in private lawsuits. The Trump administration has closely allied itself with the war aims of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose government has moved to ban the agency’s operations in its territory.

The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, was brought on behalf of about 100 Israeli plaintiffs, including survivors of the attack, the estates of some who were killed and at least one person who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. The suit says that UNRWA and current and former agency officials aided and abetted Hamas in building up its terror infrastructure and the personnel necessary to carry out the Oct. 7 attack.

That assistance included “knowingly providing Hamas with the U.S. dollars in cash that it needed to pay smugglers for weapons, explosives and other terror materiel,” the lawsuit says.

In the suit, the plaintiffs describe how they believe agency funds ended up with Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza for nearly 20 years and pledged to erase the Jewish state. The United States has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization.

The plaintiffs claim, for example, that UNRWA deliberately paid local employees U.S. dollars in cash and required them to turn to Hamas-affiliated money changers for the local currency they needed to make purchases inside Gaza. That process, the lawsuit says, “predictably” generated millions of dollars per month of additional income for Hamas.

Gavi Mairone, a human rights lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said that they welcomed the Justice Department’s letter to the judge, “clarifying that the United States stands with the plaintiffs, concurring with our arguments and legal analysis, that UNRWA and its senior managers are not above U.S. and international law.”

“No one has immunity for crimes against all humanity,” Mr. Mairone added.

Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that it had seen the department’s letter, which she said had reversed the U.S. government’s “longstanding recognition that UNRWA is a subsidiary body of the General Assembly and an integral part of the United Nations, entitled to immunity from legal process under the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations.”

Ms. Touma added that UNRWA, through its lawyers, would continue to set out the basis for its position in the court.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.