New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has named activist Tamika Mallory to a community-safety transition team, a move that raises questions given Mallory’s public account of a severe prescription pill addiction that she says peaked at 20 to 30 pills a day. Mallory, a longtime organizer who wrote a memoir called I Lived to Tell the Story, has spoken openly about entering rehab and her path to recovery. Her appointment through the group Until Freedom puts her voice at the center of shaping public safety policy for the incoming administration.
Mallory has told audiences that she battled a heavy dependency on prescription drugs while leading national protest efforts, and she has framed her recovery as part of a larger conversation about hidden addictions. She describes staying functional in intense public roles even as the pills took hold, a detail she says made the addiction especially dangerous. Her memoir and interviews have been the vehicle for those revelations.
She also recounted seeking help from former NBA player Jayson Williams in an interview and did not hide the awkwardness of her early calls. “When I first contacted Jayson Williams, the NBA All Star, you know he is in the healing space after all the things we know he went through,” she said. “My first contact with him, I was kind of like, ‘Hey, my friend is going through something, what can you tell me?'”
“He let me do that two times, two three calls. By the third call, he was like, ‘Sis, I already know what it is. It’s all good’.” Mallory has pointed to stress, public pressure and ready access to pills as the triggers that pushed her deeper into substance use. Her candor about those moments has been central to her public narrative of recovery.
“I cut them in half and started taking them. And then the next thing, you know, I learned that Percocets were even better, and I started taking those,” she said in another appearance, describing how casual use escalated into daily dependence. Below is the clip from that appearance for context.
“And then I was up to 20 to 30 pills a day. I was sitting at dinner with a group of girls one night, and this young lady, had she been through it. She was like, ‘you know, it’s a dark hole, and it doesn’t get lighter, it just gets worse. So you should stop’.” Mallory admitted she didn’t recognize the severity at first, noting the temporary relief the pills gave. “But at that time, I was kind of like, Whoo, I’m sleeping. I’m feeling a little better. And she’s like, actually, you’re not doing well at all.”
She has warned audiences that the danger of such addictions is how quietly they can fester. “Pill addiction is real because it’s silent,” she told “The Breakfast Club,” noting that people can appear stable while “taking pills to numb themselves.” That message is part of why she chose to write about her experience and push conversations about recovery into public spaces.
Mallory eventually entered rehab and has said that seeing others share similar stories pushed her to publish her memoir. “When I started to see how many people have the same experience, I knew it was time to release this story,” she said. Her recovery narrative now accompanies her role as an activist and organizer, and it factors into how supporters present her qualifications.
The appointment to Mamdani’s transition team comes through Until Freedom and sits alongside other appointees, including human-rights lawyer Angelo Pinto and rapper-turned-activist Mysonne Linen. “This is a testament to our decades of work advocating on behalf of Black and brown communities and our expertise in gun violence prevention, legislative advocacy and criminal justice reform,” the group said. “We are building something different.”
Mallory’s record beyond her recovery includes long involvement in left-wing activism, positions aligned with police-abolition movements and controversies tied to remarks about Louis Farrakhan, the Women’s March anti-Semitism dispute, criticisms of the ADL and past comments on Israel. She has also faced criticism for remarks about white women in politics and a social-media post praising Fidel Castro, and she departed her Women’s March role after repeated praise for Farrakhan drew scrutiny.
