The deranged woman who viciously ripped a Jewish nurse’s hair on a Manhattan subway while spewing antisemitic hate is a onetime promising artist with a long history of mental illness, The Post has learned.
Diana Smith, 45, racked up at least six run-ins with the police for disturbing behavior before she allegedly attacked the 23-year-old woman on a C train Sunday afternoon while screeching “Jews are eating kids,” law-enforcement sources said.
“I’ve seen her before. She does have mental issues, I can tell you that,” a neighbor at her Harlem building said Thursday, noting that she lives alone.
“One time I came out here and she was struggling at the elevator and was talking to herself and opening and shutting the front door, those types of things. I was concerned about her.”
Smith went by the name “Lady Millard” more than a decade ago and still has social media accounts showing her artwork – though the pages have not been updated in years.
She told Mixture Magazine in 2012 her work was largely focused on her father, Millard, who died of cancer when she was 12 years old.
“I get my inspiration from the people that I meet, people that I want to be like,” said Smith, who also worked in fashion design, according to the article.
“I’m also inspired by work of some of the greatest artist that have ever lived like Leonardo DaVinci. He worked with a team of people. I hope to be able to do that soon,” she told the mag.
Smith added that she wanted to “create an industry that could help people.”
But her dream apparently got engulfed by her mental health issues.
Police responded to calls about Smith’s condition six times between 2003 and 2017, with the most recent at the Apple store in SoHo, where a caller said she couldn’t care for herself, leading cops to bring her to a hospital, sources said.
During the earliest reported call, she was taken to a psych ward for mental evaluation, sources said, though the result of that assessment was unclear.
Another call, from 2011, took place on the Williamsburg Bridge, according to the sources, though additional details weren’t immediately available. Some of the other calls involved reports that she had not been taking her medication, or was “acting bipolar,” the sources said.
Smith was arrested for allegedly assaulting a cop during Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in 2011, and was also a victim of domestic violence in in The Bronx in December 2017, sources said.
Her relatives could not be reached Thursday, as Smith remained hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital for mental health issues. She was taken there following her arrest Sunday, the sources said.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said as of Thursday afternoon, she had yet to be arraigned on hate crime charges tied to the ugly incident, where she is accused of pulling the victim’s hair and pushing her to the ground.
Her neighbor said “sometimes she’s lucid, sometimes she’s not.”
“When she’s lucid she carries on a regular conversation. In one of her better moments, I was carrying groceries one time and she held the door for me and was polite,” the man, who did not want to be named, told The Post.
“But yeah, she has mental issues … I pray for her.”
