Leftist New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admits he sexually harassed women who worked for him, but claims he “meant no offense” and never touched anyone “inappropriately.”
The sexual comments with which he showered much younger women, he said on Sunday, were just innocent flirting they “misinterpreted.”
Cuomo also said he would submit to an outside investigation of the claims.
On Saturday, The New York Times published the latest accusations from a 25-year-old. Another woman followed up on accusations she tweeted in December and leveled Cuomo in a post at Medium.com last week.
She accused Cuomo of forcibly kissing her.
Latest Allegations
Accuser No. 2 is Charlotte Bennett, who worked in Manhattan for the randy governor. She quickly moved to Albany to help with the Chinese Virus crisis that killed more than 5,000 New Yorkers thanks to Cuomo’s incompetence.
“On May 15, she said she arrived at the Capitol around 7 a.m. to find Mr. Cuomo already at work. Ms. Bennett was there to drop off some briefing papers, but Mr. Cuomo was chatty, asking about her love life and, in a gossipy way, whether she was involved with other members of the governor’s staff,” the Times reported. “She memorialized the exchange in several texts to another Cuomo staff member that The Times reviewed.”
Bennett told the Times that Cuomo also began “grooming” her:
Ms. Bennett said she had mentioned a speech she was scheduled to give to Hamilton students about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. She said she had been taken aback by Mr. Cuomo’s seeming fixation on that element of her life experience.
“The way he was repeating, ‘You were raped and abused and attacked and assaulted and betrayed,’ over and over again while looking me directly in the eyes was something out of a horror movie,” she wrote in a second text to her friend. “It was like he was testing me.”
But that’s not all.
Then came an even more ham-handed come on June 5.
Cuomo told Bennett he was a mighty lonely man since breaking up with his girlfriend. He wanted another, “preferably in the Albany area,” the Times reported:
Ms. Bennett, who had just turned 25 at the time, said Mr. Cuomo had also asked about her feelings about age differences in relationships, saying “age doesn’t matter,” according to a text she sent to her friend.
“He asked me if I believed if age made a difference in relationships and he also asked me in the same conversation if I had ever been with an older man,” Ms. Bennett reiterated in an interview with The Times.
Cuomo, 63, asked Bennett whether she had sex with older men, and told her “he’s fine with anyone above the age of 22.”
“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me,” she told the Times.
Bennett played soccer against Cuomo’s daughter.
Victim No. 1
In December, Lindsey Boylan, a Democrat candidate for office in Manhattan, blasted Cuomo on Twitter for similar behavior, as The New American reported. On Wednesday, she fired again at the disgraced governor.
“Let’s play strip poker,” her story at Medium.com begins.
Cuomo suggested the game on a flight back from Western New York in October 2017 “on his taxpayer-funded jet. He was seated facing me, so close our knees almost touched. His press aide was to my right and a state trooper behind us.”
Boylan wrote that Cuomo “has created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected.”
“That’s why I panicked on the morning of December 13” last year, Boylan wrote:
While enjoying a weekend with my husband and six-year-old daughter, I spontaneously decided to share a small part of the truth I had hidden for so long in shame and never planned to disclose. The night before, a former Cuomo staffer confided to me that she, too, had been the subject of the Governor’s workplace harassment. Her story mirrored my own. Seeing his name floated as a potential candidate for U.S. Attorney General — the highest law enforcement official in the land — set me off.
So Boylan tweeted her harassment story in December.
Her promotion to chief of staff at the state economic development agency “prompted a warning from a friend who served as an executive with an influential civic engagement organization: ‘Be careful around the Governor.’” she wrote:
My boss soon informed me that the Governor had a “crush” on me. It was an uncomfortable but all-too-familiar feeling: the struggle to be taken seriously by a powerful man who tied my worth to my body and my appearance.
Stephanie Benton, Director of the Governor’s Offices, told me in an email on December 14, 2016 that the Governor suggested I look up images of Lisa Shields — his rumored former girlfriend — because “we could be sisters” and I was “the better looking sister.” The Governor began calling me “Lisa” in front of colleagues. It was degrading.
Cuomo’s torpedoes told Boylan that she looked like his former girlfriend, and he repeatedly touched her, she wrote.
In December 2016, Cuomo also ordered Boylan to his office and showed her a gift from President Bill Clinton. It was a cigar box. “The two-decade old reference to President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was not lost on me,” she wrote.
Even worse, in 2018, Cuomo assaulted Boylan after an “update … on economic and infrastructure projects.”
We were in his New York City office on Third Avenue. As I got up to leave and walk toward an open door, he stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking.
She quit that September.
Cuomo: I Did’n Mean Nuthin’
But all that was just innocent banter and playful flirting, Cuomo said:
“At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny,” he said. “I have teased people about their personal lives, their relationships, about getting married or not getting married. I mean no offense and only attempt to add some levity and banter to what is a very serious business.”
But now, he says, he gets it:
I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended. I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.
Cuomo claims he never “inappropriately touched” or “propositioned anybody.”
Cuomo appointed a judge he knew to probe matter, but later agreed to permit New York’s Attorney General Letitia James to handle a probe into the matter:
