A former assistant to Governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday provided new details to substantiate her allegations of sexual harassment – including an allegation that the top-elected New York official “kissed her on the lips without warning inside his Manhattan office.”
Lindsey Boylan – now a Democratic candidate for city council president in Manhattan – made the beautiful statement in an essay posted on the Medium website.
Boylan said the incident took place after her promotion in 2018 to be Cuomo’s deputy secretary of economic development and special adviser to the governor – a job she initially turned down “because I did not want to be near him. . “
“We were in his New York office on Third Avenue,” she wrote.
When I got up to go to an open door, he walked in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was shocked but kept walking. ”
After that, Boylan wrote, “I started working after every day,” then resigned on September 26, 2018.
Boylan also claims that Cuomo suggested, ‘Let’s play strip poker,’ while they ‘flew home from an October 2017 event in Western New York with his airplane-funded plane.’
Cuomo made the remark as he and Boylan sat down next to each other, with his press assistance to her right ‘and a state troop behind us’, according to her essay.
“Governor Andrew Cuomo has created a culture in his government where sexual harassment and bullying are so pervasive that it is not only approved but also expected,” she wrote.
Boylan made her claims in the wake of The Post’s recent revelation that leading Cuomo assistant Melissa DeRosa has privately acknowledged that his government has hidden the total number of nursing homes killed by COVID-19 for lawmakers and the public out of fear that federal prosecutors would use it “against us.”
The Post’s message led to an appeal against Cuomo’s indictment and an investigation by the FBI and the Brooklyn Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn.
In her essay of more than 1,700 words, Boylan said that DeRosa and ‘other top women’ around Cuomo had ‘normalized’ his alleged harassment, so that I only now realize how cunning his abuse was. ‘
Boylan also posted snapshots of government emails, including one in which Cuomo’s executive secretary Stephanie Benton allegedly passed on a message from him referring to a former girlfriend who was reported to show that she his kind is.
“He said Lisa was looking for Shields. You can be sisters. Except that you look like the better sister, ”reads the e-mail of 14 December 2016.
Later, Boylan wrote, Cuomo started calling me ‘Lisa’ in front of colleagues. It was humiliating. ”
Another image shows an email exchange on November 1, 2016 in which Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, Howard Zemsky – then the state’s economic development tsar – asked if Boylan would attend a meeting the next day.
Zemsky writes back: “Ha!” and added that Boylan would be in Albany “but it would be difficult for her to concentrate on the offerings as she worried about how the government was going in Rochester.”
In her essay, Boylan also said that after she first accused Cuomo of sexual harassment in a series of tweets in December, “two women reached out to me with their own experiences.”
“One described how she lived in constant fear, afraid of what would happen to her if she rejected the governor’s progress,” she wrote.
‘The other said she was instructed by the governor to warn staff members who were upset that their jobs could be in jeopardy. Both told me they were too scared to talk. ”
When she initially accused Cuomo, Boylan did not provide details about his alleged harassment and did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In a tweet on Wednesday, she said: ‘I never planned to share the details of my experience in the Cuomo government, but I am doing so now in the hope that it will make it easier for others to tell their own truth. talk.’
Cuomo’s office did not immediately return a request for comment, but the governor denied Boylan’s allegations in December.
“That’s not true,” Cuomo said during a news conference a day after her tweets.
‘Look, I fought and I believe that a woman has the right to come forward and express her opinion and express her problems and concerns. But that’s just not true. ”