Tom Donlon, former interim New York City Police Department commissioner, is suing former New York Mayor Eric Adams for defamation, alleging the city falsely portrayed him as mentally unstable.
The lawsuit, reported by multiple outlets, is Donlon’s second legal swing at Adams. Donlon sued the former mayor back in July 2025, accusing Adams of running the NYPD as a “criminal enterprise.” The latest lawsuit, filed in the state’s Supreme Court on Tuesday, names the city, Adams, and former NYPD spokesman Tarik Sheppard as defendants.
“This case concerns a deliberate and concerted effort by the sitting Mayor of the City of New York and his former NYPD chief spokesperson to publicly destroy the credibility of a senior law-enforcement whistleblower by falsely portraying him as cognitively impaired, mentally unstable, and professionally unfit — after he exposed corruption at the highest levels of City Hall and the New York City Police Department,” Donlon’s filed defamation lawsuit says, according to Politico.
After Donlon filed the federal suit in July, Sheppard alleged Donlon was suffering from “cognitive issues” and memory problems. The lawsuit cites two examples of when Sheppard asserted the claims and one instance in which Adams repeated the claim in a private meeting, according to the outlet.
“He was a man who was going through some cognitive issues with his memory, he sort of believed that there was this conspiracy against him, and I thought he was suffering some kind of disorder, I honestly did,” Sheppard told AMNY in July.
Donoln’s lawyer, John Scola, said “no evaluation was ever requested” nor was any “contemporaneous concern” ever raised, in a statement shared with Spectrum News.
“This was not opinion. It was not commentary. It was a deliberate defamation campaign — weaponizing false claims of mental illness as statements of fact to destroy a whistleblower’s credibility and punish protected conduct,” Scola said.
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Donlon served as NYPD commissioner between the administrations of Edward Caban and Jessica Tisch from September to November 2024.
Following Donlon’s removal from the NYPD and his July 2025 federal lawsuit, an Adams spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that Donlon’s claims of a criminal NYPD under Adams were “baseless accusations from a disgruntled former employee who — when given the opportunity to lead the greatest police department in the world — proved himself to be ineffective.”