A former top assistant to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, accuses him of intimidation and sexual harassment. In an essay posted to Medium on Wednesday, the former staff member accused the governor of going “out of his way” to touch her “lower back, arms and legs” and hit her during a one-on-one meeting. kiss.
Lindsey Boylan, the former chief of staff of the New York Economic Agency, claims the governor has an “uncomfortable” interest in her after she was appointed to the role in 2015. “My boss quickly informed me that the governor had a ‘crush’ on me,” she wrote, noting that the director of the governors’ offices had told her that Cuomo was proposing “images of Lisa Shields – his rumors former girlfriend – go look up because ‘we can be sisters’ and I was ‘the better sister.’
“The governor called me ‘Lisa’ in front of colleagues,” she wrote. “It was humiliating.”
Boylan, who is now running for president of the Manhattan City Council, wrote in a series of December tweets that Cuomo had sexually harassed me for years.
“I could never have expected what I would have expected: would I have been grilled at my job (which was very good) or harassed about my appearance. Or would it both be in the same conversation? It was the way it was for years,” she wrote.
The governor at the time denied the allegations. “It’s not true,” he said during a regular schedule press conference. “I have fought for and I believe that a woman has the right to come forward and express her opinion and express issues and concerns. But that is just not true.”
His office again denied the allegations Wednesday. “As we said earlier, Ms Boylan’s allegations of inappropriate behavior are simply false,” press secretary Caitlin Girouard said in a statement. Girouard said Boylan’s recollection of a 2017 flight with the governor’s jet, in which she claimed he had predicted to play strip poker, could not be true because the flight books did not match her report on who was on board. .
“He was sitting next to me, so close to our knees. His press assistant was on my right and a state troop behind us,” Boylan said of the experience. Girouard said “there was no flight where Lindsey was alone with the Governor, a single press assistant and a NYS troop.”
Cuomo’s press secretary shared what she said was the governor’s schedule from October 2017, in which each passenger appeared on his flights, as well as a statement from other assistants on the trips. “We were on each of these October flights and this conversation did not take place,” said senior adviser to Governor John Maggiore, President and CEO of Empire State Development Howard Zemsky, Cuomo’s former director of communications, Dani Lever, and former press secretary, Abbey Fashouer Collins, said. in a statement.
Boylan said she had long “tried to excuse” the governor’s behavior, but no longer after giving her an unsolicited kiss during a private meeting in his New York office. According to Boylan, the governor walked ‘in front’ of her when she left his office and kissed her on the lips. “I was shocked but kept walking,” she wrote.
Boylan said she walked past Cuomo’s executive secretary’s desk on her way out of his office, saying she was ‘scared she saw the kiss.’
“The idea that someone would think I was in my high-ranking position because of the Governor’s ‘pressure’ was more derogatory than the kiss itself,” she added.
Boylan claims that the governor’s “pervasive harassment” was not limited to her. According to Boylan, the governor also ‘made unflattering comments about the weight of female colleagues … mocking them about their romantic relationships and significant others’, and’ said the reasons men get women were ‘money and power’. “
“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,” Boylan wrote. ‘His inappropriate behavior towards women was a confirmation that he liked you, that you had to do something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak, you would have consequences. ‘
Boylan writes in her Medium essay that she is motivated to go to the public after learning that Cuomo is being considered as U.S. Attorney General. “Seeing my name float as a potential candidate for the U.S. Attorney General – the highest law enforcement officer in the country – has put me off,” she said.
“In a few tweets, I told the world what some good friends, family members and my therapist have known for years: Andrew Cuomo abused his power as governor to sexually harass me, just as he did with so many other women, she wrote.
“I know some people will break down my experience as trivial. We are used to powerful men behaving badly when no one is watching. But what does it say about us when everyone is watching and no one is saying anything?”
In response to Boylan’s essay, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked Cuomo to resign. “Sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the workplace is not a political issue, it is about right and wrong. Governor Cuomo must resign immediately,” Stefanik wrote in a statement posted on Twitter. “… Any elected official who does not immediately ask for his resignation is complicit.”
Stefanik is not the first lawmaker in New York to end Cuomo’s term. Congressman Ron Kim pleads guilty to the charge and says the governor threatened him after Kim pushed his office over ‘hidden’ data on deaths in the nursing home during the pandemic.
“This is not about a dispute between two people, it is about his ongoing efforts to engage other lawmakers with lies and a cover-up about his deadly, one-sided policy during this pandemic,” Kim wrote in the New York Daily News. “The governor’s attempt to arm me strongly to lie to his government must be the last straw.”
The FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have an investigation opened how Cuomo’s administration is dealing with nursing home residents who contracted COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic.