Bill Ackman’s twin donations have become a mirror the city can’t avoid. To Alex Pretti’s family, the money arrives wrapped in unbearable irony: support from a man who also funded the defense of the agent accused of pulling the trigger. No check can replace a son, a partner, a nurse who once believed his camera might protect the vulnerable and expose abuse. Yet refusing it feels like punishing themselves for someone else’s choices.
For Jonathan Ross, Ackman’s backing underscores a different kind of loneliness: the belief that a system demanding impossible split-second decisions will abandon its own the moment politics turn. His defenders see Ackman as one of the few willing to insist that even despised defendants deserve a real defense. In the end, the city is left sitting with a harder truth: money can’t decide right and wrong. It only forces everyone to say, out loud, what they really believe.
