An insane New Year’s Eve brawl broke out on the Upper East Side after a drunk and impatient millionaire NFL heiress allegedly started making anti-Semitic remarks at the coat check of a Manhattan restaurant. It is claimed she then attacked a man with a designer glass purse after the row spilled out onto the street.
According to a report in New York’s Daily News, which has video of the on-street fight, an argument broke out after Jacqueline Kent Cooke, the daughter of late Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, got impatient while collecting her belongings at the coat check at Caravaggio, a restaurant on East 74th Street.
She allegedly said, “Hurry up, Jew,” to the person in front of her, Matthew Haberkorn, a 52-year-old lawyer from the San Francisco Bay Area.
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“What did you say?” Haberkorn’s wife, Linda Thomas, asked.
“Hurry up, Jew. I got places to be,” Cooke allegedly repeated.
“We all got places to be,” Thomas told the Daily News she responded. “You know what? I take total offense at that. You’re small-minded.”
As the situation escalated, Cooke’s boyfriend allegedly chimed in with his own offensive remark, telling Haberkorn’s daughters, who were with the party, “Happy bat mitzvah, girls,” according to Thomas and Haberkorn.
Haberkorn told the News he went outside and confronted Cooke.
“I walked up to her and asked her why she said that,” Haberkorn told the News. “She took her purse, which was a mirrored glass purse, and smashed me with it.”
It is believed the weapon was a $300 Lulu Guinness Chloe mirrored perspex box clutch, which Cooke has previously been pictured with.
The bag apparently cut Haberkorn.
At this point, one of Haberkorn’s daughters started filming the incident on her cellphone.
The video shows Cooke’s boyfriend trying to intervene.
“She just fucking hit me!” Haberkorn is heard protesting.
“You called me a fucking bitch, you called me a c--t,” Cooke, who is on the ground, says.
“You called me a fucking Jew,” Haberkorn responds, before moving back toward the daughter who was recording.
The video turns shaky but then shows Haberkorn losing his balance as Cooke apparently pulls him down to the ground.
“What are you doing? You’re throwing a woman on the floor,” Cooke’s boyfriend accuses Haberkorn, the video shows.
“I didn’t fucking touch her,” he responds.
Thomas told the News she also went to confront Cooke, and the socialite told her, “Why don’t you use your money to get a nose job?"
Cooke and her boyfriend allegedly ran off after the confrontation.
Haberkorn said he didn’t know who his assailant was at first, but the restaurant gave her name to the NYPD.
When a reporter for the Daily News visited Cooke’s apartment Wednesday night, she was wearing pajamas and a finger splint, and denied the entire incident.
“There’s nothing that happened on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “I was here in my apartment.”
However the News reports she turned herself in at the 19th Precinct station house and was later led out in handcuffs.
