Two more women have accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment.
The latest reports appeared in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. The Post also disclosed out-of-control rages, during which Cuomo bombarded employees with screaming and scatological language.
Now that the victims’ list has risen to five, top Democrats in New York, including the State Senate majority leader, want the angry, grabtastic governor to quit.
One of them, Lindsey Boylan, a Democrat candidate for Manhattan Borough president and one of Cuomo’s many victims, put it this way on Twitter: “Resign you disgusting monster.”
Post Report
The Post’s exposé described a man who isn’t just amorous. He’s given to outrageous outbursts against aides and state employees.
The latest target of his unwanted affections to step forward is Karen Hinton, who served under Cuomo when he was secretary of housing and urban development for President Bill Clinton.
Apparently, the two didn’t get along, and “had a bad fight before she left the full-time position at the agency that ended in a screaming fit, she said, with each hurling profanities at the other.”
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The two “made peace,” though, she told the Post, and so she traveled with Cuomo to Los Angeles in 2000 as a media consultant to promote a HUD program.
When the day ended, she told the Post, Cuomo asked her back to his room, which she didn’t find strange until Cuomo warned Hinton not let his bodyguard see her.
Hinton and Cuomo chatted at length about personal affairs in a dimly lit room:
At some point, Hinton said, she grew self-conscious that she had talked so much about her personal life and her marriage. She decided to leave. “I stand up and say, ‘It’s getting late, I need to go,’ ” she said. Cuomo stood up, walked over and embraced her, she recalled.
She described it as “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate.” “It’s not just a hug,” she added. Hinton said she pulled away.
“He pulls me back for another intimate embrace,” she said. “I thought at that moment it could lead to a kiss, it could lead to other things, so I just pull away again, and I leave.”
As for Cuomo’s out-of-control temper, another woman employee described it in detail.
“You didn’t know which Andrew you were going to get,” a former HUD employee told the Post:
She recalled one incident of Cuomo yelling at her in his office so loudly that colleagues came to check on her well-being. She said she cannot recall why he was so upset or the words he used but said: “I remember thinking it was pretty vicious and over the top, like if I had killed somebody. Not even my own parents had ever yelled at me the way he yelled at me.”
Cuomo called men “pu**ies” and told them “you have no b*lls.”
Such was the governor’s fury that “Cuomo aides joke about their therapy bills from absorbing his rampages for so many years.”
Senate Leader: Time to Resign
Ana Liss, who worked for Cuomo from 2013 through 2015, told the Journal that Coumo asked if “she had a boyfriend, called her sweetheart, touched her on her lower back at a reception and once kissed her hand when she rose from her desk.”
Cuomo also kissed her at the reception, she said:
Liss recalled working at a May 6, 2014, reception at the Executive Mansion in Albany, which is Mr. Cuomo’s official residence. Mr. Cuomo was in a living room on the north side of the mansion’s first floor and noticed Ms. Liss, she recalled.
“He came right over to me and he was like, ‘Hey, Sweetheart!’” she said.
She said the governor hugged her, kissed her on both cheeks and then wrapped his arm around her lower back and grabbed her waist. They turned to a photographer, who took a picture that shows Mr. Cuomo’s hand around her waist.
Cuomo’s other three victims are:
- Boylan, who described years of harassment, including unwanted affection and kissing, on Twitter and in a post at Medium.com;
- Charlotte Bennett, whom the governor terrified with repeated discussion of a sexual assault she suffered and questions about sex with older men; and,
- Anna Ruch, who says Cuomo grabbed and forcibly kissed her at a wedding reception.
New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Cousins says Cuomo’s gotta go.
“Every day there is another account that is drawing away from the business of government,” the top Democrat said:
We have allegations about sexual harassment, a toxic work environment, the loss of credibility surrounding the Covid-19 nursing home data and questions about the construction of a major infrastructure project.
New York is still in the midst of this pandemic and is still facing the societal, health and economic impacts of it. We need to govern without daily distraction. For the good of the state Governor Cuomo must resign.
