Yahoo Finance The Cuomo sexual harassment claims appear to follow a disturbing pattern
On Saturday, a second former staffer accused the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, of sexual harassment. Charlotte Bennett was 24 when she began working for the governor in the entry-level position of briefer, which required her to have close daily contact with Cuomo. In a series of interviews with the New York Times, Bennett described a pattern of overtures from the governor that progressed from overly familiar, to inappropriate, to aggressively suggestive. He asked her whether she practiced monogamy and if she ever slept with older men (Cuomo is 63). After learning in 2020 that Bennett’s 25th birthday was coming up, Cuomo offered that he was open to sexual relationships with women over the age of 22. The implications were not ambiguous. “I understand that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Bennett told the Times. “And was wondering how to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job.”
Related: New York attorney general seeks to investigate Cuomo sexual harassment claims
Disturbingly, Cuomo seems to have incorporated a gruesome interest in Ms Bennett’s past experiences of sexual violence into his harassment of the staffer. He made much of her activism, as a college student, on behalf of the rights of sexual assault survivors, sometimes mentioning her history in ways that had nothing to do with her work and which obviously maximized her personal discomfort. In a text to a friend, Bennett described an unsettling encounter with the governor in which he brought up her past experience of assault. “The way he kept 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,” Bennett wrote. “It was like he was testing me.” As a result of the governor’s harassment, Bennett left the briefer role, and eventually left the administration altogether in November.
Bennett’s allegation of sexual harassment by Cuomo comes on the heels of that of another former staffer, Lindsey Boylan, who published an essay last Wednesday detailing her experiences of inappropriate sexual overtures by the governor, some of them assisted by his staff. Over her several years working as a special assistant to Cuomo, Boylan says she frequently received sexual comments and invitations from the governor.
He would go out of his way to touch her on her lower back and legs. He would comment on female staffers’ weight in front of Boylan and ridicule them about their sexual relationships – a pattern consistent with the comments described by Bennett. He once asked her to play strip poker on a government plane. He had his aides email her boss to ask if she was going to be present at certain events; once, a Cuomo staffer emailed her to tell her, at Cuomo’s request, that the governor thought she looked like a woman rumored to be Cuomo’s ex-girlfriend. “He said: look up Lisa Shields,” the Cuomo aide, Stephanie Benton, wrote to Boylan. “You could be sisters. Except you’re the better looking sister.” Here, too, the governor’s suggestion was not subtle.
The behavior escalated. Boylan says that Cuomo had a body man call her one evening in December 2016 and summon her to the governor’s Albany office. They were alone there, and she was afraid. He let her go, but on another occasion, at the governor’s New York City office on Third Avenue, he got her alone again, and Boylan says he kissed her as she tried to leave. She fled. Boylan eventually left the Cuomo administration, quitting in September 2018.
And then on Monday, following the accusations by Bennett and Boylan, a third woman, Anna Ruch, also came forward with an account of inappropriate and sexually aggressive behavior by the governor. Ruch – who works in Democratic politics but has never herself worked for Cuomo – ran into the governor at a wedding in 2019, where Cuomo gave a toast. When Ruch thanked him for his kind words about the couple, Cuomo put his hand on her lower back, which was bare due to the cut of her formal dress. Unhappy to be touched, Ruch remove Cuomo’s hand, and he registered her discomfort, calling her “aggressive.” But even though he knew she was unhappy with his advances, Cuomo reportedly pressed on. She says he grabbed her face, asked, “Can I kiss you?” and allegedly managed to touch his lips to her cheek as she squirmed away.
The incident was captured in a cell phone photo from that evening, in which Cuomo can be seen with his palms pressed into either side of Ruch’s face. Ruch wears an expression of profound discomfort, a grimace conveying both her own revolusion and her fear of upsetting the governor, who looms over her. The picture, published by the New York Times, added visceral corroboration to the already disturbing allegations. Looking at Ruch’s expression gives the same impression as hearing fingernails scrape across chalkboard – it makes you want to flee, which must be how Ruch herself felt. Texting a friend about the incident the next day, she wrote, “I’m so pissed.” Expressing her outrage at the insult to her dignity, Ruch referred to the governor as “This fucking guy.”
The accusations come at a precarious moment for Cuomo, and it’s likely that Boylan and Bennett were able to come forward in part because the governor’s grip over state politics is not as ferociously tight as it once was. In the election of 2018, a progressive wave swept many of Cuomo’s allies and mouthpieces out of the state house, where they were replaced by young, committed, female progressive state legislators like state senators Jessica Ramos and Alessandra Biaggi, and state assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who have been willing to challenge the Cuomo administration. Recently, it was revealed that Cuomo’s administration had deliberately undercounted the number of Covid deaths in the state’s nursing homes. That scandal prompted some members of the state legislature to speak out against his administration with a frankness that would have been much less possible before the 2018 shift.
To Cuomo, it’s not his behavior that’s a problem – it’s the women’s behavior
Cuomo isn’t happy with this new state of affairs. When the Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim, of Queens, publicly rebuked the Cuomo administration after news of the nursing home cover-up broke, Cuomo personally called Kim when the assemblyman was at home with his children, threatening to “destroy” Kim if he did not retract his comments. In a television appearance after the call from Cuomo, Kim referred to Cuomo’s long history of threats, insults and petty vindictiveness towards both subordinates and lawmakers. He summarized the governor’s actions this way: “He has abused his powers. And abusers are cowards.”
The new accusations of sexual harassment by the governor are being treated differently because of the gendered nature of such abuse. But Cuomo’s alleged treatment of Boylan and Bennett is not unrelated to his non-sexual degrading, humiliating and controlling treatment of other subordinates, or to his more generalized sense of entitlement and impunity in the exercise of his own power. Rather, the sexually harassing behavior that Cuomo allegedly directed towards Boylan and Bennett seems to be an extension of his pattern of manipulation and degradation more broadly. Sexual harassment is its own phenomenon with its own dynamics, but it is also part of a spectrum of abusive behaviors alleged against the governor, all of which stem from the same origin: his desire to assert his own power by degrading those around him.
There have been widespread calls for an investigation into the women’s claims, but little agreement about what that investigation should look like. Cuomo seems weak-willed and indecisive about how the allegations will be treated, asserting authority over the future investigation that he does not have and changing his position in response to pushback. First, Cuomo called for an investigation, but named as his preferred investigator a former federal judge with close ties to his administration. When that choice was criticized, he said that he would ask the elected attorney general, Letitia James, to appoint an investigator in concert with the chief justice of the state supreme court, a gubernatorial appointee. When James rejected this idea, Cuomo backed off again, conceding that the attorney general alone had the authority to appoint an investigator. Why the governor has become aware of the powers of the attorney general’s office only now has not been made clear.
Under mounting pressure, Cuomo issued a statement on Sunday night that can’t quite be characterized as an apology. “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,” Cuomo wrote. “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.” The statement went on to claim that the governor “never inappropriately touched anybody” – a statement that is at odds with Boylan’s accusations.
In the statement, Cuomo asserts that his behavior was well-intentioned and merely socially clumsy, casting himself in the role of the affable but incompetent man who harasses women by accident – a trope that the writer Lili Loofbourow has identified as “the myth of the male bumbler”. But this version of events strains credulity, if for no other reason than that it undersells Cuomo’s own skills. As a politician with a long career in the public eye, the governor is adept at tailoring his own message and anticipating how it will be received.
It was Cuomo’s very skillfulness in communication that was on display in his famous coronavirus television briefings last year, media spectacles that brought him to national prominence for his skillful wielding of both information and tone for maximum impact. Some of those briefings, in which Cuomo was so masterfully in control of his own image, occurred during the period when Bennett says that Cuomo’s harassment of her was ongoing. The idea that Cuomo could be so perceptive regarding how he was perceived on TV, but so oblivious as to how he was perceived by his own staffers, is outlandish and far-fetched, if only because it sells short Cuomo’s well-honed skills as a communicator.
But at the same time that the statement attempts to cast Cuomo as clueless and incompetent over his own interactions with Boylan and Bennett, it also attempts to assert his own authority over how those interactions should be interpreted. Cuomo says that he “never intended” to make inappropriate or sexual suggestions to the women. He says they “misinterpreted” him. This framing says that it was not the governor’s behavior that was wrong – that it wasn’t wrong of him, say, to suggest strip poker or to ask his 25-year-old executive assistant if she slept with older men – but rather that the women were wrong to interpret these words as sexual.
To Cuomo, it’s not his behavior that’s a problem – it’s the women’s behavior, their audacity in feeling uncomfortable. In the statement, Cuomo shifts responsibility from himself on to the women who allege harassment. It’s not his job to behave appropriately. It’s their job to accommodate him, and to ignore their own discomfort.
“At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny,” Cuomo wrote. “I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good-natured way.” The suggestion is that his sexual harassment was an extension of normal, acceptable behavior – of affable teasing meant to foster a sense of camaraderie and community at work. But from what we know of the actual work environment in the Cuomo administration, it seems much more likely that the sexual harassment alleged by Boylan and Bennett was in fact an extension of bad behavior – the abuse and degradation of subordinates meant to reinforce his own power and control. It was a kind of bullying – something that Governor Cuomo is very accustomed to.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
