Yet another woman has accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment.
Accuser Eight is Cuomo employee Alyssa McGrath, the New York Times reported on Friday. McGrath says Cuomo was a relentless harasser who made inappropriate remarks about her looks and appearance.
Accuser Eight worked with Accuser Six, who says Cuomo grabbed her breast.
You Married?
McGrath told the Times that Cuomo mixed “flirtatious banter with more personal comments, as well as a subtle and persistent cultivation of competitive relationships between female co-workers in his office. It was something she said was compounded and protected by a demand for secrecy, and normalized inside the governor’s inner circle.”
One of those co-workers was Accuser Six, who told her story to McGrath after the Times Union of Albany reported it. “She froze when he started doing that stuff to her,” McGrath told the Times:
She added that the co-worker, who has not been publicly identified, told her that the governor had asked her not to talk about the alleged incident, knowing that the two women regularly spoke and texted about their interactions with Mr. Cuomo.
“He told her specifically not to tell me,” Ms. McGrath said.
Thirty years Cuomo’s junior, McGrath told the Times that Cuomo’s “surrogates” called upon executive assistants to work at the mansion on weekends. One Saturday, McGrath and her co-worker were alone with Cuomo and the two were discussing a trip to Florida:
Ms. McGrath was separated from her husband at the time. While chatting with the two women, the governor asked the co-worker — who was married — if she was going to try to meet men and “mingle” while they were in Florida.
The women laughed off the question, as did the governor, but not before giving them a nickname.
“He called us ‘mingle mamas’ for the rest of the day,” Ms. McGrath said.
Cuomo also thought quite a bit of himself, the Times reported. He “asked the co-worker to pose for a photograph with him and send it” to McGrath to make her jealous. “It was common knowledge around the office that Mr. Cuomo would play favorites among female staffers,” the Times reported.
“We were told from the beginning that was a typical move of his,” McGrath told the Times. “Who was the girl of the week? Who was the girl of the month?”
Cuomo Pounced Quickly
Cuomo began harassing McGrath almost as soon as she began working for him in 2018, she alleged.
“Early the following year, she was called to the governor’s second-floor office in the mansion,” she told the Times:
While she prepared to start working, Mr. Cuomo asked Ms. McGrath if she spoke Italian — she does not, though she is of Italian heritage — and then made a comment in that language. She later asked her parents what the phrase meant.
“It was commenting on how beautiful I was,” she recalled being told.
After that, during a dictation session with the governor, McGrath caught Cuomo “blatantly looking down my shirt.” Of course, she was embarrassed and told her co-worker. The two “regularly texted” and “confided in each other in part because an informal policy prohibited them from speaking to anyone outside the executive chamber about Mr. Cuomo.”
“We were told right off the bat, as soon as we walk out of the office or as soon as we walk away from the governor, we were not to say a word about anything to anyone,” McGrath said.
And “at an office Christmas party in 2019, the governor’s attention to her and her co-worker continued,” she told the Times:
“He kissed me on the forehead,” Ms. McGrath said. “And in the picture we posed with him that year, he is gripping our sides very tightly.” The Times reviewed a photo of the two women and the governor, with the governor grinning, his hands wrapped firmly around their waists.
Cuomo Won’t Resign
Cuomo won’t quit, a top “insider” told the New York Post.
“He’s not resigning,” the insider said. “There’s been no notion of him resigning. There’s no rationale to resignation. There’s no upside.”
That isn’t true, of course, given that the allegations will likely keep coming. On Thursday, the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reported a new detail from Lindsey Boylan, Accuser One.
After a meeting at the executive mansion, Cuomo’s puppy, Captain, “jumped up and down near her,” Boylan told Farrow:
She reached out to calm him, and then backed away. Cuomo, she said, joked that if he were a dog, he would try to “mount” her as well. Boylan said that she did not reply. “I remember being grossed out but also, like, what a dumb third-grade thing to say.” She added, “I just shrugged it off.” A spokesperson for Cuomo declined to comment specifically on the claim, but reiterated Cuomo’s denial that he behaved inappropriately with Boylan.
