An Australian envoy to the United Nations fell to his death in New York City early Wednesday morning when a “trust game” went disastrously wrong, according to police.
Julian Simpson, a second secretary for Australia’s permanent mission to the U.N., fell from the seventh story to the second story of a Lower East Side apartment building after a boozy attempt to build trust with another man, the New York Post reports.
Simpson had been drinking with friends and had gone to the apartment building to view the Empire State building, sources told the police. Simpson took another man’s wife up to a higher balcony, and began spinning her around as a joke. When the woman’s husband confronted Simpson inside the apartment, the U.N. diplomat said he didn’t mean any harm and wasn’t trying to scare her, according to the sources.
The two then went outside, and Simpson suggested that to prove that he was trustworthy, they should play a trust game where Simpson would lean off the balcony and rely on the husband to catch him.
“I will prove that you can trust me,” Simpson told the husband, according to witnesses who spoke with the police, the New York Daily News reports. “Let’s play the trust game.”
Simpson got to the ledge and leaned back. The husband told police investigators that he extended his arm to catch Simpson, but he had slipped and fell several stories.
The police said investigators did not suspect foul play, and that everyone they interviewed admitted to drinking and showed signs of inebriation.
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