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The wife of a former NYPD top cop was treated like a felon after a minor traffic stop as payback for her husband’s ugly, high-profile feud with department brass, a bombshell new lawsuit claims.
Deidre O’Connor-Donlon said she was pulled over just one month after ex-interim police Commissioner Thomas Donlon almost came to blows with another high-ranking cop at the New York City Marathon, the complaint filed Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan claims.
The 52-page lawsuit is the latest chapter in the simmering beef between the NYPD and the Donlon’s, including a federal corruption claim filed by the former commissioner over the summer.
“It’s our contention that the arrest never would’ve happened if they weren’t retaliating against Commissioner Donlon,” O’Connor-Donlon’s lawyer, John Scola, said Monday.
“It’s a bad arrest. It never should’ve happened,” he said. “She’s still trying to get over the stress of the arrest. Basically she was arrested for no reason, they handcuffed her to the bench. She’s traumatized.”
According to the lawsuit, O’Connor-Donlon was driving near East 56th Street and First Avenue on Dec. 16, 2024, when she was involved in a minor fender-bender that brought cops to the scene.
She said the encounter was “calm and routine” — until the officer on the scene got a phone call from a supervisor that changed everything, the lawsuit claims.
O’Connor-Donlon said she was put in handcuffs, taken to the 17th Precinct stationhouse and kept in custody for more than two hours — only to ultimately be released with a clean slate, the suit said.
However, news of the arrest, including the Donlon’s home address, made it into the night’s news reports.
The lawsuit suggests the news was leaked by the former commissioner’s enemies inside the NYPD.
The feud between Thomas Donlon and other department brass reached a boiling point during last year’s marathon, when since-retired Chief of Staff Tarik Sheppard and Donlon got into a scuffle.
The two got into a shouting match when Sheppard photo-bombed a pic Donlon was posing for, with the argument getting so heated the two had to be separated as punches were about to fly.
Sheppard — a controversial figure who once called a reporter for The Post a “f–king scumbag” over a simple press question — put in for retirement in April.
However, this summer, Donlon, a former FBI bigwig, turned things up a notch by filing a 251-page federal complaint, claiming the NYPD under Mayor Eric Adams “was criminal at its core.”
“It’s core function was to shield loyalists and silence internal critics through a calculated regime of favoritism, retaliation and concealment,” the federal complaint claimed.
In September, Donlon followed up by sending a criminal referral letter to the US Department of Justice seeking an investigation into Adams and top aides at City Hall, claiming a probe was needed to “dismantle a criminal conspiracy inside the NYPD.”
Now, O’Connor-Donlon has jumped into the fray.
The city’s law department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on her lawsuit.
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