A former top assistant to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has accused him of harassment and sexual harassment, building on the allegations she first made in December. In an essay posted on Medium on Wednesday, the former staffer accused the governor of “doing his best” to touch her “lower back, arms and legs” and kiss her during a one-on-one meeting.
Lindsey Boylan, the former New York State Economic Service Chief of Staff, claimed the governor had an “uncomfortable” interest in her after she was appointed to her role in 2015. My boss soon told me that the governor was in love with her. ‘With me,’ she wrote, saying that the director of the Governor’s Offices had told her that Cuomo suggested she ‘look up pictures of Lisa Shields – his rumored former girlfriend – because ‘we could be sisters’ and I ‘the better sister.’ ”
“The governor started calling me ‘Lisa’ in front of colleagues,” she wrote. “It was humiliating.”
Boylan, now running for president of Manhattan, wrote in a series of tweets in December that Cuomo “sexually harassed me for years.”
“I could never foresee what to expect: would I be grilled at work (which was really good) or bothered about my appearance. Or would it be both in the same conversation? This was the way for years,” she wrote.
The governor at the time denied the charges. “It’s not true,” he said during a regularly scheduled agenda press conference“I’ve fought for it and I believe that a woman has a right to come forward and speak up and express issues and concerns that she has. But it’s just not true.”
His office again denied the charges on Wednesday. “As we said before, Ms. Boylan’s claims about inappropriate behavior are simply false,” said press secretary Caitlin Girouard in a statement. Girouard said Boylan’s memory of a 2017 flight on the governor’s jet – to which she claimed he suggested playing strip poker – cannot be true because the flight logs don’t match her account of who was on board.
“He sat facing me, so close that our knees almost touched. His press officer was to my right and a state agent behind us,” Boylan said of the experience. Girouard said, “There was no flight where Lindsey was alone with the governor, a single press officer and a NYS Trooper.”
Cuomo’s press secretary shared what she said was the October 2017 governor’s schedule, listing each passenger on his flights, as well as a statement from other aides during the trips. “We were on each of these October flights and this conversation didn’t materialize,” said senior adviser to Governor John Maggiore, Empire State Development president and CEO Howard Zemsky, Cuomo’s former communications director Dani Lever and former press secretary Abbey Fashouer Collins. in a statement.
Boylan said she was “trying to apologize” for the governor’s behavior for a long time, but couldn’t after he gave her an unsolicited kiss at a private meeting at his New York City office. According to Boylan, the governor stepped in front of her as she left his office and kissed her on the lips. “I was in shock, but I kept walking,” she wrote.
Boylan said she walked past Cuomo’s secretary’s desk when she left his office, saying she was “afraid she’d seen the kiss.”
“The idea that someone would think I was in my high position because the governor was ‘in love’ with me was more humiliating than the kiss itself,” she added.
Boylan claimed 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 … made fun of 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 within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying are so widespread that it is not only condoned but expected,” Boylan wrote. His inappropriate behavior towards women was confirmation that he liked you, that you must do something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak, you would face the consequences. ‘
Boylan wrote in her Medium essay that she was motivated to go public after hearing that Cuomo was being considered for the U.S. Attorney General. “When I saw that his name was a potential candidate for the US Attorney General – the highest law enforcement officer in the country – I dismissed myself,” she said.
“In a few tweets, I told the world what some close friends, family members and my therapist had known for years: Andrew Cuomo abused his power as governor to sexually harass me, just as he had done with so many other women,” she wrote. .
‘I know some will dismiss 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 looking and nobody says anything? ‘
In response to Boylan’s essay, New York Republican congressman Elise Stefanik called for Cuomo to resign. “Sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace is not a political issue, it’s about right and wrong. Governor Cuomo must resign immediately,” Stefanik wrote in a statement. Twitter“… Any elected official who does not immediately request his resignation is an accomplice.”
Stefanik is not the first New York legislator to call for Cuomo’s term of office to be ended. Congressman Ron Kim has argued for impeachment, saying the governor threatened him after Kim pressed into his office for “hidden” records of deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic.
“This is not about a feud between two people, it is about his ongoing efforts to involve other lawmakers in lies and a cover up for his deadly, one-sided policies during this pandemic,” Kim wrote in the New York Daily News. “The governor’s attempt to force me to lie to his administration should be the last straw.”
The FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have done that opened an investigation how Cuomo’s administration treated nursing home residents who contracted COVID-19 in the first months of the pandemic.