Dalya Attar became the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland Senate this January
US federal officials have charged a Maryland Democratic state senator with extortion for allegedly masterminding a blackmail scheme involving secretly filmed explicit videos, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday.
Dalya Attar, who was first elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022, became the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland State Senate earlier this year.
Court documents allege that Attar devised a plan to stop a former employee from speaking out against her 2022 re-election bid. Prosecutors say she conspired with her brother, Joseph Attar, and Baltimore police officer Kalman Finkelstein, who had worked on her campaign.
Staring in 2020, they worked to threaten the ex-employee into silence, using covertly taken videos of her in bed with a married man, the court documents alleged. According to WhatsApp messages cited in the case, Attar said she wanted the ex-consultant to be “a nonissue in my mind.”
“Two years later [she]is still looking to screw me badly… even more reason why the lady should be afraid to come out with anything at any point,” Attar was cited as saying.
The group allegedly conspired to follow the ex-consultant’s movements using a tracker on her loaned car, and to secure intimate videos of her with her lover by installing cameras disguised as smoke detectors, the court documents said. The victim was staying at an apartment owned by Finklestein’s family at the time.
The indictment says that Joseph Attar later approached the ex-consultant’s lover to threaten them with the release of the video and demanding she “stay out of this election.”
All three have been charged with extortion, wiretapping, and other offenses, and face a sentence of at least 20 years if convicted on all counts.
