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Director Lexi Alexander Cheered a Times Square Killing, New York Post Says

Lexi Alexander, an Oscar-nominated director, posted a meme about alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione after Erin Piacenti, 32, was killed.

Lexi Alexander, the director, in a photograph from Wikimedia Commons
Lexi Alexander, the director whose posts about the Times Square killing drew the backlash. (Shekixu / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

An Oscar-nominated film director answered news of a fatal stabbing near Times Square with a meme about Luigi Mangione. The director is Lexi Alexander (“Green Street Hooligans”), and The New York Post reported on September 2, 2026 that she was celebrating the death of a 32-year-old bank vice president. The paper described the image as Batman looking up at a bat signal carrying Mangione's face. The Post calls Mangione the alleged CEO killer. It pushed the story out from its own X account the same day.

The woman who died was Erin Piacenti, 32, a Bank of America vice president. She'd gone back to work that day from a five-month maternity leave. She was stabbed in the abdomen with a kitchen knife on Monday, August 31, and died at a hospital, the Post reported. She and her husband, Frank Piacenti, had marked their second wedding anniversary in August.

The attacker was Pamela Cisneros, 49, according to the Post, which reported that she stabbed a man as well before officers shot her dead. The paper described the attack as random and unprovoked. Piacenti graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Fordham Law School, the Post reported, and had moved to a New Jersey suburb.

Alexander's meme replied to a post that identified Piacenti by her job title at Bank of America, the Post reported. In a comment under her own post, the outlet reported, she claimed Israeli bots were mobilizing against her, as she said they had when boycotts of the bank were first called. She linked to a January article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the bank recommending investment in Israeli banks.

She posted again later. The Post quoted her: “Israel doesn't care about the woman who got killed, they care about the positive rating BofA gave them in the middle of a genocide. There is huge money at stake.”

By the afternoon of September 2, the post had drawn close to 400,000 views, the Post reported. The replies ran heavily against her. Users accused her of cheering a stranger's killing, the paper reported.

Alexander is 52 and was born in Germany to a German mother and a Palestinian father, per her website as cited by the Post. She won a world kickboxing title in 1994, at 19, and worked as a stuntwoman. She was nominated at the 75th Academy Awards for the live-action short “Johnny Flynton.”

The Post reported that she has been a vocal critic of Israel's conduct in Gaza since the war with Hamas began in October 2023.

A Bank of America spokesperson told the Post the company was shocked and saddened by Piacenti's death, and called her “a valued teammate who will be greatly missed.”

Alexander's representatives didn't immediately respond to the Post's request for comment, the outlet said.

Source: x.com, retrieved September 6, 2026.

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