The 30-second television advertisement showed star doctors from a top-notch Manhattan hospital clumsily playing football. From the sidelines, a former standout player for the Giants suggested they should stick to medicine.

The ad promoting NYU Langone Health probably did not rank among this year’s most memorable Super Bowl commercials. But it sure bothered one viewer: a North Carolina congressman.

The lawmaker promptly sent NYU Langone’s chief executive a stern letter, noting that the hospital benefits from federal funds.

“I write today with questions about your stewardship of this money, including our serious concern about your decision to purchase a 30-second advertisement — estimated to cost $8 million — during Super Bowl LIX,” Representative Greg Murphy, a Republican, wrote on Feb. 11. The letter contained a list of pointed questions about NYU Langone’s finances. It is the sort of missive that congressional offices routinely write to gather information for lawmaking or hearings.

NYU Langone is hardly the only New York hospital to spend money on a national advertising campaign, although a Super Bowl ad is unusual. Those commercials speak to the intense competition among the country’s elite medical centers. The congressman’s reaction illustrates that with the promise of being in the spotlight comes peril.

But, it turns out, opinions can change. Eight days after he first contacted the hospital, Representative Murphy wrote a follow-up letter. And that letter could not have been more different. The congressman had gone from critic to booster.

The second letter expressed enthusiastic admiration for NYU Langone’s “world class patient outcomes” and “superb” metrics — such as fewer deaths and shorter hospital stays. “America would be much healthier if all hospitals could report these excellent numbers,” he wrote.

Representative Murphy’s letter stated that he had been left “all-the-more impressed” after recently speaking with NYU Langone’s chief executive, Dr. Robert Grossman. The letter does not indicate whether Dr. Grossman and the congressman had a phone call or met in person.

But just two days before Representative Murphy sent his second letter, a private jet had landed at the sleepy airport in Greenville, N.C., the state’s 12th-largest city, where Representative Murphy lives.

The Bombardier Global 5000 was registered to Invemed Securities, the parent company of Invemed Associates, the investment firm founded by Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire benefactor of NYU Langone and the chairman of the hospital’s board of directors. Mr. Langone, who is best known for cofounding Home Depot, has given hundreds of millions of dollars to NYU’s hospital system. In return, his name appears on the hospital. And Mr. Langone’s largess allows for free tuition at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

He is also a major Republican donor, contributing more than $500,000 since 2020 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives. He has donated millions more to other Republican organizations, such as the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC. Records do not show campaign donations from Mr. Langone to Representative Murphy; there can be delays in reporting contributions.

It is not clear who was on the plane.

A spokesman for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, declined to answer questions about the hospital’s interactions with the congressman or his staff members. Mr. Ritea also declined to say whether Dr. Grossman, the hospital CEO, flew to see Representative Murphy. Mr. Langone did not respond to requests for comment.

Representative Murphy’s office also declined repeated interview requests on the topic. But his spokesman acknowledged that it might seem “a little confusing” that the tone in Representative Murphy’s letters to Dr. Grossman went from critical to admiring. His spokesman would not share any information about material Dr. Grossman provided or what led the congressman to turn so quickly from critic to booster.

“I don’t have much to add,” the spokesman for the congressman, Alexander Crane, said. “I’d certainly understand that, you know, from A to B to C might seem a little confusing, but basically they had a wonderful private conversation.”

Representative Murphy is a urologist who still regularly treats patients in Greenville. Another doctor at the same office where the congressman sees patients, Dr. Jonathan Hamilton, said he did not know if Mr. Langone or Dr. Grossman came to Greenville to visit Representative Murphy. The incoming chairman of the county’s Republican Party said he hadn’t heard of any such visit either.

The operations manager for the Pitt-Greenville Airport Authority, John Hanna, confirmed that an aircraft with a tail number matching Mr. Langone’s private jet was “here for a short duration.” Flight records, accessible through FlightAware.com, a company that tracks flight information, place that private jet on the ground at Pitt-Greenville Airport for more than two hours on the afternoon of Feb. 17, Presidents’ Day. The plane had flown in from Boca Raton, Fla., and returned there afterward. It appears to have been the only time this year the plane went to Greenville.

Two days later, Representative Murphy released a statement along with his second letter.

“I was left impressed and grateful for the work the institution is doing,” he said.

Representative Murphy’s first letter, on Feb. 11, had posed questions that went beyond how much the Super Bowl ad had cost and how NYU Langone had paid for it. The congressman also asked about the hospital’s overseas investments and why it had sought a “rural” designation that would have increased the subsidies it received. NYU Langone is on Manhattan’s East Side, on land that hasn’t been rural for two centuries.

The letter sought information on whether the health system was exploiting legal loopholes to maximize profit.

In his follow-up letter, on Feb. 19, Representative Murphy wrote that he considered all his “questions thoroughly answered.”

But his office has declined to provide those answers to the public.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

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.