Curtis Sliwa’s Love Life Is Absolutely Bonkers
Curtis Sliwa is a long way away from getting elected mayor, which is probably for the best. The founder of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer crime-prevention organization known for its signature red berets (which often leave a tan line on his head), Sliwa is the only Republican on the ticket, and he’s running on a platform that includes adding 7,000 more cops to the NYPD, opposing a new law that keeps renters from paying broker fees, and cutting the city’s education budget. While you might oppose him politically, morally, and aesthetically, it’s hard to deny that he makes for great TV. He is a Republican, but he doesn’t like MAGA. He supported Bernie Goetz, but he also speaks positively about knowing Tupac’s family. He will always find a way to get in front of a camera or host a radio show, and he currently lives in a studio apartment with his wife and a bunch of cats. For better or worse, he’s a true New Yorker.
Part of Sliwa’s gross but endlessly fascinating appeal is that he has been married four times and was involved in an alleged affair that involved sperm donation and accusations of stealing tons of cash from his then-wife. Clearly, this guy has some kind of charisma that really works on the right kind of woman, often ones who work for the Guardian Angels. Let’s take a look at all of Sliwa’s wives and lovers and see if we can make any sense of it.
Koren Drayton
Sliwa’s first wife is a bit of a mystery. They were married in 1975, when Sliwa was 21, and got divorced a year later. Drayton is Black and from the Virgin Islands, which is a fact Sliwa loves to bring up. “I loved Angela Davis at the time,” Sliwa told the New York Post in 2021. “Like her, Koren had that magnificent ’fro, the looks … We shared a love for soul music. She was a very good dancer. This was like nirvana for me.”
He has brought her up several times during his current campaign, always when talking about race relations in the city. During a visit to Brownsville, Drayton’s neighborhood, he recalled the time he spent in the neighborhood in the ’70s. “Boy, that was an experience, the only white guy there, married to Koren Drayton at the time. I couldn’t go back to Canarsie because I was married to a Black woman, and the brothers were like, why are you coming into our community, snacking on our women. I was damned if you do, damned if you didn’t,” he said.
Drayton conveniently came up again during a recent appearance in Harlem, where mayoral candidates were asked to discuss how their policies would affect Black women. According to the Amsterdam News, Sliwa reflected on “living in Brownsville, as well as through his first of many wives when he married Koren Drayton, a Black woman from the Virgin Islands.” It’s unlikely that whatever he said was any more tasteful than the sound bite he offered during his Brownsville visit.
The most curious thing about Drayton is that she appears to not exist at all on the internet. There are no photos of her, no social-media profiles, and only mentions of her in relation to Sliwa. He says he hasn’t spoken to her at all since their split nearly 50 years ago. Koren, if you’re out there, please get in touch.
Lisa Evers
Have you seen that photo of a young Sliwa in his red beret cheek-to-cheek with a beautiful woman? That’s Lisa Evers. Evers joined the Guardian Angels and organized a chapter in Atlanta, where she caught Sliwa’s eye in the spring of 1981. She went on to become the national director for the organization, which will be a theme with Sliwa’s spouses. “I began acting more human in her presence,” Sliwa told a young Graydon Carter in Time. The couple got married on Christmas Eve 1981 and stayed together for over a decade. During their time together, Evers juggled her Angels job with working as a professional model, publishing a book, and even a stint as a professional wrestler. In 1990, she and Sliwa began hosting a radio show together called Angels in the Morning.
these photos are insane pic.twitter.com/v1IETz4cAt
— alex lei (@alexL_E_I) October 21, 2025
In 1992, Sliwa was kidnapped and shot after entering a stolen taxi. He managed to escape through the window of the cab. While Sliwa had previously gotten in hot water over crime hoaxes, this one was legit — John A. Gotti, son of the famous crime boss, was eventually charged with attempted murder for the incident. (The charges were later dropped in 2005.) Gotti was apparently not happy with comments Sliwa made about his father on his radio show, which included calling him a drug dealer and “public enemy No. 1.” According to Sliwa, he began to receive death threats around this time, which was not good for his marriage. “It caused a wedge, and everything began to come unglued,” he told the Post. The couple got divorced in 1994. Evers now works as a reporter for Fox 5 in New York, where she mostly covers crime. She’s also dear friends with 50 Cent.
Mary Paterson
Sliwa married Paterson (then Sliwa, née Galda) in 2000 when she was, you guessed it, the executive director for the Guardian Angels. She was good at it, too, according to the New York Times, at one point pulling in more than $1 million a year for the group. I guess in Sliwa’s world, it’s not an HR violation if everyone is still doing their jobs well. In 2004, she gave birth to their son, Anthony. The couple got divorced in 2012, when, according to the Post, she accused him of having an affair with his former girlfriend, Melinda Katz (more on that in a moment).
After suing him for over $1 million and losing (I promise we’re getting there), Paterson moved on and married former New York governor David Paterson. After many years of tumult, she and Sliwa seem to have figured out a decent situation. The Post said that both parties described their relationship as “good,” with Sliwa praising her new husband. “Mary deciding to marry Gov. Paterson was great,” Sliwa told the Post. “He’s an outstanding stepfather to Anthony.” So they’re basically the Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin of New York vigilantes.
Melinda Katz
Katz, the longtime New York City politician and current Queens DA, has an interesting history with Sliwa. The pair first met in 1993 when Katz, a Democrat, was running for State Assembly. Nothing came of that meeting, but they crossed paths again after she was elected. While he was in Albany lobbying against rent regulation (Katz supported it), she invited him to her office.
“I thought, why go to her office with all these rent-control advocates who hate me,” Sliwa told the Post in 2012. “I figured I’d take advantage of the offer, take a rain check, and ask her out on a date.”
Sliwa was freshly divorced from Evers at the time, and he and Katz went for a walk in Rockefeller Park for their first date. They then dated casually for two years. In 1998, about three years after they broke up, Katz was running against Anthony Weiner for Chuck Schumer’s congressional seat and had to have an ovary removed. Even though they were no longer together, she reconnected with Sliwa for a big ask.
“I asked Curtis, ‘Do me a favor. I’m worried about my fertility. Will you make a [sperm] donation for me? He said, ‘Sure.’ It was as simple as that,” Katz recalled. Katz got pregnant using Sliwa’s sperm in 2008 — a decade later — and gave birth to their first son, Carter. By Katz’s choice, Sliwa was not involved in Carter’s life. Then, in 2010, Katz got pregnant again by way of Sliwa’s sperm donation, this time with twins. At 31 weeks, she underwent an emergency C-section and gave birth to one boy and one stillborn baby. Katz called Sliwa, and he spent three weeks in the NICU looking after their newborn, Hunter.
Having weathered all this together, Sliwa and Katz got back together in 2011, and he moved into her Forest Hills home. In their 2012 interview with the Post, they said they had plans to get married. In 2013, Paterson sued Sliwa for $1.45 million, claiming that he and Katz “conspired with each other to drain” hundreds of thousands of dollars from his and Paterson’s shared assets. She also called him “an inveterate, world-class liar” and claimed that the sperm donations had actually happened shortly before the pregnancies, and not in the late ’90s. She also accused him of having an affair with Katz, and provided some very explicit voice-mails Katz purportedly left for Sliwa to prove it. Ultimately, a judge tossed the case in September 2014. That whole situation might have put a bit too much strain on Sliwa and Katz, as they split on Election Day in 2014.
Nancy Regula
For his fourth wife, Sliwa went back to the Guardian Angels. Regula, 42, is an attorney who currently works with Sliwa’s organization. In a Facebook post celebrating their 2018 nuptials, Sliwa wrote that they met in 2015 while he was patrolling Central Park with the Guardian Angels and she was rescuing cats. He says he had been sleeping on the floor of his radio-station office at the time, so he quickly moved into Regula’s Upper West Side apartment. The couple got married upstate in 2018 on Regula’s birthday — not in a cute rural inn or a renovated barn run by Brooklyn expats, but in a cave. I bet they really saved on florals.
They still live in Regula’s 325-square-foot studio, where they care for a number of cats that seems to be in constant flux — in 2021 the New York Times reported that it was 16, but Sliwa recently said that if he were elected mayor he’d bring his six cats to Gracie Mansion. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem likely to happen, so one of New York’s historic buildings will not be smelling like cat urine anytime soon.
What do all of these women have in common? With the exception of Drayton, who we know basically nothing about, these are all pretty successful women with serious careers who seem like no-nonsense types. It’s somewhat shocking that they all wound up falling for one of the most ridiculous guys in the city. The heart wants what it wants, I guess, and sometimes it wants a spotlight-obsessed hustler who can’t be trusted as far as you can throw him.
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