Biden Says Cuomo ‘Should Resign,’ as Sexual
Harassment Findings Emerge
Investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11
women who accused Mr. Cuomo of inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments
to instances of groping.
Luis
Ferré-Sadurní
By Luis
Ferré-Sadurní
Aug. 3,
2021
Gov. Andrew
M. Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women, including current and former government
workers, whose accounts of unwanted touching and inappropriate comments were
corroborated in a damning report released on Tuesday by the New York State
attorney general, Letitia James.
The
165-page report prompted multiple calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, including from
President Biden, a longtime ally of the governor, and it cast doubt on Mr.
Cuomo’s political future. The Democratic speaker of the State Assembly said on
Tuesday that he intended to quicken the pace of a separate impeachment inquiry,
adding that Mr. Cuomo “can no longer remain in office.”
The report,
the culmination of a five-month investigation, included at least three
previously unreported allegations of sexual harassment from women who accused
Mr. Cuomo of improperly touching them, including a state trooper assigned to
the governor’s security detail. It also highlighted far-reaching efforts by the
governor, his staff and close associates to disparage and retaliate against one
woman who made her allegations public.
All told,
the investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11 women, nine of whom
are current or former state employees, who accused Mr. Cuomo of a range of
inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments to instances of groping,
through interviews with 179 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents.
The report
described in stunning detail how Mr. Cuomo’s behavior and actions by his top
officials violated both state and federal law, offering a look at the inner
workings of the governor’s office and how it failed to properly handle some of
the women’s allegations. It also shed a light on a sprawling network of
associates, including former aides and close allies, enlisted by Mr. Cuomo and
his staff to aggressively fight the allegations on behalf of the governor.
Investigators
said that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, and his aides fostered a toxic work
culture that was rife with fear and intimidation, and helped enable “harassment
to occur and created a hostile work environment.”
“The
independent investigation found that Governor Cuomo harassed multiple women,
many of whom were young women, by engaging in unwanted groping, kisses,
hugging, and by making inappropriate comments,” Ms. James, a Democrat, said
during a news conference in Manhattan, adding, “I believe these women.”
Mr. Cuomo
responded to the findings in a 14-minute prerecorded statement delivered from
Albany. In a sweeping, slightly disjointed soliloquy, the governor denied most
of the report’s serious findings, reiterating his contention that he had never
touched anyone inappropriately. He suggested the report was politically
motivated and declared that “the facts are much different from what has been
portrayed.”
“I never
touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” he said.
“I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is
just not who I am, and that’s not who I have ever been.”
In
defending his behavior, Mr. Cuomo mentioned that one of his relatives was
sexually assaulted in high school and suggested it was sexist to accuse his
female supervisors of creating a hostile workplace. His speech was even
interlaced with a slide show of photographs of him kissing public officials on
the cheek, gestures he said were “meant to convey warmth, nothing more.”
The
political fallout from the report was swift: It prompted Mr. Biden, a longtime
friend of the governor, to call on Mr. Cuomo to resign on Tuesday, months after
stopping short of asking the governor to step down because the investigation
was ongoing.
“What I
said was if the investigation by the attorney general concluded that the
allegations were correct, back in March, I would recommend he resign,” said Mr.
Biden, who had not spoken with Mr. Cuomo. “That is what I’m doing today.”
“I think he
should resign,” the president said.
Representative
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, joined the existing and ever-growing
chorus of calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, as did three House Democrats from New
York who originally said they wanted to wait on the report before weighing in
on Mr. Cuomo’s fate.
Even Mr.
Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors in nearby Northeastern states joined the
chorus. In a joint statement, the governors of Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Pennsylvania and New Jersey said that they were appalled at the investigation’s
findings and that Mr. Cuomo should step down.
The
contents of the report, and the subsequent backlash, would seem to limit Mr.
Cuomo’s political future, and serve as a serious obstacle to being re-elected
to a fourth term — once regarded as a near certainty for a governor previously
hailed a national leader during the coronavirus pandemic.
The
Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which could impeach Mr. Cuomo with a
simple majority vote, has been conducting a broad impeachment investigation
into the governor, examining a series of scandals with a common theme:whether
or not Mr. Cuomo abused his power while in office.
Democrats
in the Assembly held a closed-door emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss
whether to draft articles of impeachment based solely on the findings of the
attorney general report, a move that appeared to have support among many of the
50 or 60 lawmakers who spoke, according to four people with knowledge of the
meeting.
After the
meeting, Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said his chamber would “move
expeditiously and look to conclude our impeachment investigation as quickly as
possible.” It could take a month to complete the existing inquiry and draw up
the articles of impeachment, according to a person familiar with the process.
A trial in
the State Senate could commence as soon as September or early October, the
person said. If Mr. Cuomo were to resign or be removed from office, Kathleen C.
Hochul, the state’s lieutenant governor, would succeed him, making her the
first woman to become governor in the state’s history.
On Tuesday,
Ms. Hochul said she believed the governor’s accusers, describing Mr. Cuomo’s
documented behavior as “repulsive and unlawful.” She said that it was up to the
Assembly to determine the next steps, adding that “it would not be appropriate
to comment further on the process at this moment” because she is next in the
line of succession.
The
attorney general’s investigation was spearheaded by two outside lawyers: Joon
H. Kim, a former federal prosecutor who once served as acting U.S. attorney of
Manhattan, and Anne L. Clark, a well-known employment lawyer.
On Tuesday,
Mr. Kim said their investigation revealed a pattern of troubling behavior from
Mr. Cuomo and found that the culture within the executive chamber “contributed
to conditions that allowed the governor’s sexually harassing conduct to occur
and to persist.”
“It was a
culture where you could not say no to the governor, and if you upset him, or
his senior staff, you would be written off, cast aside or worse,” Mr. Kim said.
“But at the same time, the witnesses described a culture that normalized and
overlooked everyday flirtations, physical intimacy and inappropriate comments by
the governor.”
Ms. Clark
said that the governor’s conduct detailed in the report “clearly meets, and far
exceeds” the legal standard used to determine gender-based harassment in the
workplace.
“Women also
described to us having the governor seek them out, stare intently at them, look
them up and down or gaze at their chest or butt,” she said. “The governor
routinely interacted with women in ways that focused on their gender, sometimes
in explicitly sexualized manner in ways that women found deeply humiliating and
offensive.”
Understand
the Scandals Challenging Gov. Cuomo’s Leadership
Card 1 of 5
Multiple
claims of sexual harassment. Several women, including current and former
members of his administration, have accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment or
inappropriate behavior. He has refused to resign.
Results of
an independent investigation. An independent inquiry, overseen by Letitia
James, the New York State attorney general, found that Mr. Cuomo sexually
harassed multiple women, including current and former government workers,
breaking state and federal laws. The report also found that he retaliated
against at least one of the women for making her complaints public.
Nursing
home death controversy. The Cuomo administration is also under fire for
undercounting the number of nursing-home deaths caused by Covid-19 in the first
half of 2020, a scandal that deepened after a Times investigation found that
aides rewrote a health department report to hide the real number.
Efforts to
obscure the death toll. Interviews and unearthed documents revealed in April
that aides repeatedly overruled state health officials in releasing the true
nursing home death toll over a span of at least five months. Several senior
health officials have resigned in response to the governor’s overall handling
of the virus crisis, including the vaccine rollout.
Will Cuomo
be impeached? On March 11, the State Assembly announced it would open an
impeachment investigation. Democrats in both the State Legislature and in New
York’s congressional delegation called on Mr. Cuomo to resign, with some saying
he has lost the capacity to govern.
The
attorney general’s investigation was a civil matter, and as such, has no
criminal consequences for the governor. But after the report became public on
Tuesday, David Soares, the Albany County district attorney, said that his
office had opened a criminal investigation into the governor and that it would
be requesting investigative materials that the attorney general’s office had
obtained.
In theory,
unwanted touching and groping of people’s intimate parts could lead to criminal
charges, experts said, but as a practical matter, prosecutors would have to
prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, a high legal hurdle.
Creating a
hostile work environment is a violation of federal and state civil rights law,
and victims could decide to bring civil lawsuits against Mr. Cuomo if the
allegations concerned conduct within the statute of limitations, which is
roughly three years under federal and state law.
While many
of the accounts in the attorney general’s report had been previously reported,
some were new: The report said that Mr. Cuomo, on multiple occasions, sexually
harassed an unnamed female state trooper who he had requested join his
protective detail.
Mr. Cuomo,
the report said, once ran his hand across her stomach when she held the door
open for him at an event; ran his finger down her spine when she stood in front
of him in an elevator; kissed her on the cheek; and asked her why she did not
wear a dress. The woman, whose account was backed by witnesses, including other
troopers, told investigators she felt “completely violated.”
In late
February, Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development official in the Cuomo
administration, became the first woman to outline her claims that Mr. Cuomo
harassed her, which she said occurred multiple times from 2016 to 2018. The
report found that Mr. Cuomo touched her waist, legs and back; kissed her on the
cheek and lips; and suggested once on a plane that the two play “strip poker.”
The report also said that the governor’s office “actively engaged in an effort
to discredit” Ms. Boylan by, in part, leaking her personnel records.
A few days
after Ms. Boylan publicly accused Mr. Cuomo, Charlotte Bennett, a former
executive assistant to Mr. Cuomo, told The New York Times that the governor
made comments that she took as sexual overtures while they were alone in his
Albany office last year. The report found that the governor asked whether she
had relationships with older men, told her that he was “lonely” during the
pandemic and “wanted to be touched,” and asked if she was monogamous.
In early
March, a current female aide who has not been publicly identified leveled one
of the most serious allegations: She said Mr. Cuomo groped her while they were
alone on the second floor of the Executive Mansion in Albany late last year.
The report
bolstered the account, saying that Mr. Cuomo’s behavior toward the woman, who
was not named but instead referred to only as Executive Assistant #1, included
“regular hugs and kisses on the cheek (and at least one kiss on the lips)” and
“incidents where the governor grabbed Executive Assistant #1’s butt.”
“The
Governor, during a hug, reached under Executive Assistant #1’s blouse and
grabbed her breast,” the report said. The governor denied the women’s account
on Tuesday, and said he would refrain from commenting on the matter because the
woman’s lawyer could be seeking to press charges.
After his
remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo released a written response to some of the
investigation’s findings through his lawyer, Rita Glavin, who called the report
“unfair” and “inaccurate.” Among other things, Ms. Glavin highlighted social
media posts from some of the women praising the governor even after leaving his
office and also cited emails and a calendar showing that on the day that Mr.
Cuomo was accused of groping his executive assistant, several other workers
were in the mansion, and the two were only alone together briefly.
Following
the report’s release, some of the women and their lawyers issued statements
expressing vindication, while also forcefully condemning the governor’s
reported behavior, as well as his remarks on Tuesday, with some saying he
should be removed from office.
“I feel a
sense of relief today,” Ms. Bennett said, adding that, “It’s been an extremely
stressful process, it has been on my mind every day, there is not a day that I
haven’t thought about this report.”
On March 1,
as the governor faced a flurry of allegations and calls for his resignation,
Mr. Cuomo authorized Ms. James to oversee an investigation led by outside
lawyers into any sexual harassment claims against him. But in recent weeks, Mr.
Cuomo and his office escalated efforts to discredit the report before its
release, questioning Ms. James’s political motivations and Mr. Kim’s
independence.
Previously,
Mr. Kim was involved in a federal investigation into Mr. Cuomo’s decision in
2014 to abruptly dissolve an anticorruption panel known as the Moreland
Commission; he also was involved in the prosecution of a former top aide to Mr.
Cuomo, Joseph Percoco, who was convicted of federal corruption charges in 2018.
Much of the
focus will now swing back to the State Assembly, whose judiciary committee has
been examining whether Mr. Cuomo obscured the death toll of nursing home
residents during the pandemic; whether he used state staff and resources to
write a book on leadership last summer that netted him $5.1 million; and
whether the governor’s family and close associates received priority
coronavirus testing, among other issues.
Reporting
was contributed by Jonah E. Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Michael Gold, J. David
Goodman, William K. Rashbaum, Katie Rogers, Brian M. Rosenthal, Dana Rubinstein
and Mihir Zaveri.
Luis
Ferré-Sadurní covers New York State politics in Albany. He joined The Times in
2017 and previously wrote about housing for the Metro desk. He is
originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. @luisferre
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