TV personality and cook Rachael Ray is known for her ear-to-ear smile and fast meals, but she can also throw hands. Ray recently revealed that pre-fame, she played the unwilling role of an ATM for a teenage mugger, not once but twice, right outside her Queens apartment.
“He has literally a Glock in his hand and sticks it in my back, and I scream so loud. They heard it in Jersey … I freaked the flip out, and I think I scared him more than he scared me,” she told the NY Post.
“I sprayed him in the face with Mace and he was not happy,” she recalled. However, the host of Rachael Ray’s Meals in Minutes occasionally feels pangs of regret for defending herself. Looking back, she feels the firearm-wielding teen wasn’t a real threat.
“I still feel really bad about it actually,” she admits. “I don’t think that child would have hurt me.”
A Pooch on Paw-trol Rescued Rachael Ray From the Mean Streets of NYC
Back then, Rachael Ray was employed at Agata and Valentina, a renowned Italian gourmet market on the Upper East Side. On the evening of the incident, she concluded her work at 11 p.m. and made her way to her apartment in Queens.
The meager pad was infested with vermin, but there was a special reason the future famous foodie stuck around. “There were roaches in my apartment, but I stayed because I was so worried about the dog that lived there,” she recalled.
Ray looked after Liza, the superintendent’s dog, confined by a chain in the laundry room. She often fed the young dog, an act that paid off when the pooch possibly saved her life from a returning mugger days later.
“The kid came back to mug me a second time because he was pissed,” Ray recalled of the teen mugger she previously implied was not a threat. “He pushed me down this little alleyway, and Liza runs down the hall at him and she scared him away. He was petrified of the dog,” she explained.
Rachael Ray Also Fought Off an Enraged Ex-Lover
Sadly, this wasn’t the only violent NYC encounter Ray endured in her pre-fame days. Around the same time, Ray had to test her pugilism skills with her jealous boyfriend.
“He was very sweet, very kind, very funny, gorgeous … just not an ambitious fella. He liked weed and the sofa,” she recalled. “I literally opened the window and threw his s–t in the street. I just got so fed up.”
However, the booted boyfriend kept tabs on her, and because livid when he spotted Ray being courted by another suitor.
Relaxing in her roach-infested apartment, Ray thought she heard a sound of thunder. However, it was the enraged ex pulling down the fire escape. He climbed up the building and jumped through the living room window.
What followed was a brutal confrontation in which Ray literally fought tooth and nail.
“We had a real ruckus,” she recalled. “I bit his thumb and the blood went all over. It was bad.”I felt really terrible about it because I really loved him very much.”
Post-boyfriend saga and armed teen holdups, Ray bid NYC adieu and hightailed it back to her roots in Glens Falls, upstate New York.