Outgoing Schools Chancellor David Banks on Wednesday blasted critics who raised questions about the timing of his marriage to First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright — which came just days after their boss, Mayor Eric Adams, was indicted.
“We decided to keep it quiet. No bride wants a whole group of reporters showing up at their wedding,” Banks told Fox 5’s “Good Day New York.”
The declaration came after the longtime loves’ Saturday nuptials on Martha’s Vineyard prompted murmurs that the pair married to claim legal “spousal privilege,” or the right of a wedded couple to decline to testify against each other.
But Banks said the two had been “planning the marriage for a while” and that their “parents getting older and having some health issues” prompted them to tie the knot.
“We made the right decision to do it when we did and any suggestion otherwise to me is just ridiculous on its face,” he said.
Also raising eyebrows was the mayor’s absence from the wedding of two of his closest aides — which came the day after he was arraigned in Manhattan federal court on sweeping corruption charges.
Adams and Banks have long touted their close relationship, with Hizzoner going as far as to call the veteran educator his “brother” during the schools chancellors’ official resignation announcement.
Banks said Wednesday that only “immediate family and friends” had been invited to the wedding.
Asked about Hizzoner not being at the ceremony, Adams spokesman Fabien Levy told The Post that “the mayor was in town taking care of the city all weekend.”
In the first pictures to come to light after the clandestine event show Banks and Wright lovingly embraced in their wedding whites, while walking and laughing through a picturesque garden.
Rumors previously swirled that Banks and Wright, who have been together for more than a decade, planned a wedding last summer.
Their relationship has come under renewed public scrutiny, after federal agents showed up at their Harlem home last month and seized their phones. Neither has been accused of a crime.
The raid unfolded nearly simultaneously with others across the city that swept up since-resigned NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban and Banks’ brother, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, among other top Adams officials and allies.
Adams was indicted last week on charges he took bribes from Turkish officials and other foreign nationals and defrauded taxpayers out of $10 million in matching campaign finance funds.
He has pleaded not guilty.