How Josh Shapiro Went From Sure Vice-Presidential Nominee to Untouchable

The Scandal That Was Never Going to Go Away

William Spivey
The Polis
Published in
5 min readAug 7, 2024

--

By Maryland GovPics — 148th Preakness, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136158729

Governor Josh Shapiro almost had the selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate in hand. A rally had been announced in his home state of Pennsylvania, presumably to announce he’d been chosen as the Democratic Party Vice-Presidential nominee. He was undoubtedly working on the speech he’d give at the Democratic National Convention and prepping for a debate against Republican J.D. Vance until it all went horribly wrong.

An item from Shapiro’s past blew him out of the water. There was no hint of the criminality plaguing the Trump campaign, but it was the kind of thing that just looked wrong and would never go away.

In 2011, 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg died in her Manayunk apartment. She’d received 20 stab wounds, several to the back of her head. Greenberg was found by her fiancee, Samuel Goldberg, with a 10-inch knife lodged in her chest. There was also a massive gash in the back of her head. Goldberg said he gained access to the apartment by breaking down the door.

Police investigators treated Greenberg’s death a suicide, citing that she had no defensive wounds and that the door was locked from the inside with no signs of an intruder. The Medical Examiner’s office declared it a…

--

--

William Spivey
The Polis

I write about politics, history, education, and race. Follow me at williamfspivey.com and support me at https://ko-fi.com/williamfspivey0680