In October, Governor Andrew Cuomo was promoting his book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic, just seven months after said pandemic began. Tens of thousands of people had died in his home state; at one point, New York City had the highest death rate in the world. Critics thought his bombast was arrogant and insensitive given how much New Yorkers had suffered and were still suffering — after the holidays, and Cuomo’s book publication, the infection rates in New York soared again.
Now, Cuomo is facing a firestorm stemming from serious allegations: that he exhibited harassing and sexually inappropriate behavior toward two of his former aides, including one instance of forcible kissing. Lindsey Boylan first came forward to say Cuomo “sexually harassed [her] for years” via Twitter in December but did not go into detail about what transpired. (A representative for Cuomo said there was “simply no truth to these claims” at the time.) The accusations snowballed this month after New York State assemblyman Ron Kim accused Cuomo of calling him at home, berating him, and telling him he would “destroy him” in response to statements Kim gave to the press. Multiple reports have quoted anonymous and on-the-record government officials stating Cuomo has long managed via intimidation and bullying tactics.
Last week, Boylan detailed her accusation in a Medium post, and another staffer went public with her own account of harassment over the weekend. An investigation into the allegations has been turned over to the New York State AG, and multiple public officials have called for Cuomo’s resignation.
Here’s everything we know about the allegations against Governor Cuomo:
Lindsey Boylan first accused Cuomo of sexual harassment in December.
Boylan served in the Cuomo administration as executive vice-president of Empire State Development and then as a special adviser, from March 2015 to October 2018. She is currently a candidate for Manhattan borough president. On December 13, Boylan tweeted a thread about harassment in the workplace and abuse of power, during which she wrote, “Yes, @NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched… I could never anticipate what to expect: would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks. Or would it be both in the same conversation? This was the way for years.” Her thread followed a tweet the day before in response to rumors that Cuomo was being considered for a position in the Biden administration: “There are fewer things more scary than giving this man, who exists without ethics, even more control,” she had written.
Boylan did not elaborate at the time and declined to talk to the press. The governor’s press secretary denied the claims to the New York Times, and Cuomo told reporters he knew about the thread but denied any wrongdoing. “I fought for, and I believe, a woman has the right to come forward and express her opinion, and express issues and concerns that she has, but it’s just not true,” he said. Asked whether or not he had ever commented on Boylan’s looks, Cuomo reiterated that “the tweets were simply not true.”
Earlier this month, Assemblyman Ron Kim said Cuomo called him and aggressively threatened him at home after Kim publicly criticized him.
On February 11, Kim spoke critically to the New York Post about allegations that Cuomo and his administration had covered up nursing home deaths in New York during the coronavirus pandemic. (The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York have launched an investigation into the administration’s conduct.) Kim says that Cuomo called him at home later that day, extremely angry, and opened by asking, “Are you an honorable man?”
“He goes off about how I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger,” Kim told the New York Times, “that he would destroy me and he would go out tomorrow and start telling how bad of a person I am and I would be finished and how he had bit his tongue about me for months.” Cuomo’s team called Kim a liar; Kim said on the View that Cuomo “has abused his powers. And abusers are cowards.” The Times reported that Kim’s version of events “rang true” for many former employees of the governor, who said he had a tendency toward aggression.
Boylan was inspired to go public with more details.
In a Medium post published on February 24, Boylan detailed the allegations of sexual harassment she had alluded to previously, in part inspired by Kim’s speaking out against Cuomo. “Last week, Assemblymember Ron Kim spoke out publicly about the intimidation and abuse he has faced from Governor Cuomo and his aides,” Boylan wrote. “As Mayor de Blasio remarked, ‘the bullying is nothing new.’ There are many more of us, but most are too afraid to speak up.” Boylan said that the night before she wrote her December 13 thread, she had heard from “a former Cuomo staffer [who] confided to me that she, too, had been the subject of the Governor’s workplace harassment.”
Boylan elaborated in her post that Cuomo allegedly fostered a toxic and intimidating environment in which “sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected.” She said Cuomo would touch her on the lower back, arms, and legs; that her boss told her the governor had a “crush” on her; and that Cuomo would make comments about female staffers’ weight and appearance. She also described an episode in which the harassment became physical: “We were in his New York City office on Third Avenue” at a meeting, she wrote. “As I got up to leave and walk toward an open door, he stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking.” Boylan also said that she had heard from an additional two former staffers after she wrote her tweets in December who had similar stories of harassment by Cuomo, but they were afraid to speak out.
In a statement, Cuomo’s press secretary repeated the governor’s response that Boylan’s allegations were “untrue” and refuted one of her claims that during an October 2017 flight, the governor suggested they play “strip poker.” Four staffers had been on all of the flights with Boylan and the governor that month, they said, and all four denied that the interaction Boylan describes took place.
Her account prompted one of Cuomo’s former executive assistants to come forward.
Over the weekend, Charlotte Bennett, a former executive assistant who worked for Cuomo in 2019, accused Cuomo of sexual harassment via an article in the New York Times. Bennett, 25, told the Times that she initially “got along really well” with her Cuomo but that something eventually changed. First, Cuomo seemed to develop a fixation with the fact that she was a survivor of sexual assault, she said. Then, on June 5, according to Bennett, Cuomo held her back in his office and questioned her repeatedly about her personal life. “He asked me if I believed if age made a difference in relationships and he also asked me in the same conversation if I had ever been with an older man,” she said, and that Cuomo had said he’d felt lonely since his breakup with celebrity chef Sandra Lee and talked about “wanting a girlfriend, preferably in the Albany area.” Bennett texted friends after the conversation, messages the Times reviewed, that Cuomo had stressed how “age doesn’t matter” to him and that he said he’d be “fine with anyone above the age of 22.” “I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Bennett said.
Bennett brought the encounter to the attention of Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, who eventually transferred her to a different department away from the governor; nonetheless, Bennett quit in November 2020.
Cuomo denied the allegations but offered an apology.
After Bennett’s accusations went public, Cuomo issued a lengthy statement. “I never intended to offend anyone or cause any harm,” the governor said, but admitted that “at work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny.” “I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended,” he wrote. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.”
He reiterated that he denied many of the specific accusations against him, however: “To be clear I never inappropriately touched anybody and I never propositioned anybody and I never intended to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but these are allegations that New Yorkers deserve answers to,” he said.
Bennett, Cuomo’s second accuser, did not find the statement persuasive. “As we know, abusers — particularly those with tremendous amounts of power — are often repeat offenders who engage in manipulative tactics to diminish allegations, blame victims, deny wrongdoing, and escape consequences,” she said in a statement of her own the next day. “It took the governor 24 hours and significant backlash to allow for a truly independent investigation. These are not the actions of someone who simply feels misunderstood; they are the actions of an individual who wields his power to avoid justice.” Her lawyer said that Cuomo “was not acting as a mentor, and his remarks were not misunderstood by Ms. Bennett … He was abusing his power over her for sex. This is textbook sexual harassment.”
But then a third woman spoke out, saying Cuomo once tried to kiss her without her consent.
On Monday night, the New York Times published a report on a woman who says Cuomo grabbed her face and tried to kiss her at a wedding in September 2019. Anna Ruch, 33, has never worked for Cuomo or for New York. She said she met the governor for the first time after he gave a toast at the reception, and that he immediately touched her bare lower back.
“I promptly removed his hand with my hand, which I would have thought was a clear enough indicator that I was not wanting him to touch me,” she told the Times. But Cuomo simply called her “aggressive,” she continued, and moved his hands to her cheeks — a moment one of her friends captured on camera. “He said, ‘Can I kiss you?’” she recalled, explaining that she flinched away so he missed her mouth. She then posed for a photo with him, although she “felt so uncomfortable and embarrassed.” But “really,” she added, “he is the one who should have been embarrassed.”
“It’s the act of impunity that strikes me,” Ruch said. “I didn’t have a choice in that matter. I didn’t have a choice in his physical dominance over me at that moment. And that’s what infuriates me.”
A spokesperson for the governor reportedly referred the Times back to Cuomo’s statement from Sunday night when asked for comment.
New York State AG Letitia James will oversee an investigation.
In his apology statement, Cuomo repeated calls for “an outside, independent review that looks at these allegations” — but already the nature of that investigation has become an issue of contention. According to the Albany Times Union, Cuomo initially “proposed a ‘review’ by an outside attorney, then floated the idea of having AG James and state Chief Judge Janet DiFiore select an outside attorney — both notions that James rejected as insufficient.” By Sunday, when he released his apology, Cuomo had relented, granting James full purview over the choice of investigator. The Times Union reports Cuomo backed down after “intense bipartisan pressure from national and state politicians, and even from within his own administration, seeking a truly independent probe of the allegations.”
This article has been updated with more information.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
See details here >>
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét