“Can’t anybody here play this game?” a legendary manager of a hapless start-up team once asked. It applies here as well. Now I don’t know whether Hiram Monserrate is really Hiram Monster Rat as claimed by the Daily News. I’ve never met the man, never spoken to him on the phone (Although, full disclosure, I once campaigned for his opponent, John Sabini).

Four Updates Newsday's Rocco Parascandola reports NYPD doing forensic tests on the glasses said to have cut Ms. Giraldo and Juan Gonzalez has an excellent review here. Try also this NY Times review which includes new detail about videos and witnesses and this Daily News report with even more.

State Senator-Elect Monserrate, charged with felony-domestic-violence assault on his girlfriend, Karla Giraldo has, by his statements and by those of his "supporters," created over and over again, the image of someone who is guilty, guilty, guilty. I’ve known public relations professionals and many of them could have worked Mr. Monserrate’s side of the story without making the mess Mr. M's team has done so far. In my view, although you should feel free to ask Howard Rubenstein, Mr. M could have been silent or he could have spun one straight story and stuck to it – but no. The story – leaked out by Mr. Monserrate’s “supporters” -- has changed day by day as new facts and “factoids” are uncovered.

Mr. Monserrate stated that the twenty-stitch cut he inflicted on Ms. Giraldo’s face resulted from an accident. When building security video surveillance cameras showed Mr. M struggling with his bgff in the hallway and stuffing her purse down the garbage disposal, his “friends” began passing the rumor that Mr. M was protecting Ms. Giraldo from DRUGS in her purse. The purse, however, it turns out, contained not drugs but another man’s PBA card.

Some of us won’t grok right away to the significance of a PBA card. Cops get privileges: they carry weapons, they can get parking plaques and, when they’re in trouble they can show ID, say they’re “onna job” and get significant consideration from other officers. They can extend that consideration to friends and family by giving them PBA cards which alert other cops to extend courtesy to those carrying them.

Mr. Monserrate, according to a statement attributed to Ms Giraldo

found a card and asked me whose it was? I told him that it was from a police officer friend of mine, he responded that I didn’t need to have other people’s cards, that in case of any emergencies that he was here to help me, he then threw the card in the garbage

.

Please note that in this account, the purse was not tossed away – even though it has been reported to have been recovered from the garbage. Was Mr. M. enraged that his girlfriend had taken another’s PBA card? He said he was all the protection she needed and stuffed her purse and its contents down the chute. Apparently, if we’re to believe what the girl friend says next, that was the end of the fight. I don’t know about her, but women I’ve asked have said that if I had put their purses down the garbage chute, I’d be in BIG TROUBLE.

The story now goes that Mr. M., carrying a glass of water, trips and falls over Ms. G (who is quietly lying on his bed having meekly accepted his purse-disposal.). The broken water glass, it is said, then accidentally cuts her.

This version does not account for surveillance videos . They show "Giraldo, the sources said, tried in vain to prevent Monserrate...from throwing her bag down the garbage chute.

Then after the assault, she emerged from the apartment, a towel on her face, and banged on a neighbor's door for help. But the video shows Monserrate grabbing her by the arm and dragging her outside, where he put his arm around her in an attempt to make it look like they were an affectionate couple, sources said."

In a statement which feels to me to have had a once-over by a careless publicist, Ms. Giraldo now states that she asked Mr. Monserrate to take her to (fairly distant) Long Island Jewish Hospital instead of Elmhurst Hospital Center (almost adjacent) because Elmhurst lacked a plastic surgery service. The Queens Tribune quotes Ms Giraldo as follows” I told him that I didn’t want to go to a hospital in Queens, but that I wanted to go to the Long Island hospital that has a plastic surgeon.” This is the sort of factoid which undermines the credibility of her statement. Did the people who cooked up this version of the events think no one whould look at the Elmhurst Hospital Website?

Supervised by Mr. Sinai Medical School, Elmhurst is a level 1 Trauma Center – that is; it’s set up for people who’ve been cut among other injuries and it has a plastic surgery service. Long Island Jewish has an emergency room and a plastic surgery service too. You could look it up. Interestingly, by driving to the New Hyde Park hospital, Mr. Monserrate had to pass several other emergency rooms operated by LIJ but inside NYC.

See also, fyi, Gothamist's report more or less ripping off Liz Benjamin's -- who has been all over this incident like -- well, you know.

The charges facing Mr. Monserrate are serious as are the personal consequences for both him and Ms. Giraldo. Putting together a statement about the which events which accounts straight forwardly for the known facts would be big step in getting to the next stage of this, at least as I see it.