The Vindication of Andrew Cuomo’s Accusers

On Tuesday morning, sitting at the dining table in her Manhattan apartment, Charlotte Bennett watched as Andrew Cuomo, her old boss, appeared on her computer screen. It was the Governor’s first public appearance since a state attorney general’s report corroborated the accusations of sexual harassment and other misconduct that Bennett and ten additional women had made against him. Several minutes passed before the purpose of Cuomo’s speech became clear. First, the Governor said that he wanted to apologize to the women whom he “truly offended.” Then he referred to “this controversy” as “unfair,” “politically motivated,” and “untruthful.” His “instinct,” he said, “is to fight.” Only about halfway through did it dawn on Bennett that Cuomo intended to leave office. “He couldn’t resign without first being the victim and blaming all of us,” Bennett, who worked as an executive assistant and senior briefer to Cuomo, told me. Still, before Cuomo was even done talking, Bennett and her boyfriend were celebrating and hugging.

Cuomo’s announcement gave Lindsey Boylan little satisfaction. Boylan, who worked as an economic development official in his administration from 2015 to 2018, was the first woman to publicly accuse Cuomo of sexual harassment. In response, the Governor’s office orchestrated what the attorney general’s report determined to be an unlawful retaliation campaign. Even as the Governor announced his intention to step down, on Tuesday, his office kept up its attacks. Minutes before Cuomo’s speech, his lawyer, Rita Glavin, delivered her own remarks—live-streamed on the state government’s Web site—in which she said, of Boylan, “She was out for some type of revenge against the Governor’s office.”

“It was like December 13th again,” Boylan told me, referring to the day last year when the Governor’s office leaked confidential internal documents about her to the press. “I’m speaking up and I’m being retaliated against—except now it’s on national news across the country. That’s what it felt like, when his lawyer went on air and said I was a liar, again, and suggested that I was politically motivated.” The attorney general’s report noted that the Governor and his circle were convinced that Boylan came forward to boost her campaign for Manhattan borough president. There’s no evidence she got a boost. In June, she conceded the borough-president race after attracting about ten per cent of the vote in the Democratic Party primary. “I think we can all agree it was ludicrous to go against, at the time, the most popular, the most powerful Democrat in the country,” Boylan said. “Strategically speaking.”

Ron Kim was on a phone call on Tuesday when one of his aides interrupted to say that he should probably be watching the Governor’s remarks. Kim, who represents a slice of Queens in the New York State Assembly, played a crucial role in the chain of events that led to the Governor’s downfall. In February, he publicly criticized the Cuomo administration’s attempts to suppress the true number of New York nursing-home residents who died of COVID-19. Soon after, he got an irate call from the Governor, who threatened to “destroy” him. Rather than fall in line, as so many in Albany have done in the Cuomo era, Kim told reporters about the call. A few days later, Boylan published an essay about her time in the Cuomo administration—which moved Bennett to go public, too. Several other women then came forward in quick succession, including Brittany Commisso, an executive assistant who still works in the administration, who said that Cuomo had groped her in the executive mansion. Within days, the Governor had been compelled to authorize the attorney general to investigate the harassment complaints against him, and impeachment proceedings got under way in the State Assembly. “I didn’t expect any outcome when I came forward, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this,” Kim told me on Tuesday, shortly after Cuomo’s speech. “It was really the eleven brave women that stepped up after me—if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here.”

A hallmark of the Cuomo scandals has been a peculiar sense of surprise at the unsurprising. For years, people in New York politics traded tales of Cuomo’s bullying, vindictiveness, and domineering ways. And yet, when Boylan, Kim, Bennett, and others came forward with specific stories, they had the force of revelation. That the attorney general’s report would be devastating for Cuomo should have been anticipated, considering the amount of evidence that had been turned up against him this winter by the press, without the benefit of subpoena power. Still, many were taken aback by the report’s severity and breathtaking detail. Even Cuomo, who had signed off on the attorney general’s investigation because, he said, he was owed “due process,” seemed unable to accept that due process had gone against him. Boylan was not surprised at either the content of the report or how it was received. “It was worth the wait,” she said. “It was worth the wait to be able to counter this master manipulator who doesn’t care about truth, who doesn’t care about fact, who doesn’t care about abuse. It had to be airtight.”

Cuomo is facing multiple criminal and civil investigations, as well as a pending impeachment inquiry. And yet the timing of his resignation caught most everyone off guard—a final unsurprising surprise. Only weeks ago, news reports were saying that he was making preparations for a 2022 reëlection campaign. Lawmakers and journalists were gaming out how an impeachment vote would go in the Assembly, and how the ensuing trial might unfold in the State Senate. “The expectation was that this was going down in a floor fight in the State Senate,” one former Cuomo administration official told me this week. “That there was going to be a lot of blood on the ground, a whole lot of anger, that this was going to be ugly, and there was no other way for this to go.”

In the end, however, Cuomo found himself backed into a corner, practically alone. The Democratic Party, from Joe Biden on down, had disowned him. Even longtime allies and lieutenants, such as Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York State Democratic Committee, and Alphonso David, Cuomo’s former counsel who was involved in the retaliation campaign against Boylan, were urging him to go. “Talk about reaping what you sow,” another former administration official told me. “He is reaping a lifetime’s worth of bad will.”

The fight over the future of New York politics has already begun. On Wednesday, Kathy Hochul, the current lieutenant governor, who will succeed Cuomo later this month, gave an interview declaring herself “ready for this.” Many are already speculating about who else—from Attorney General Letitia James to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—may run against Hochul in a Democratic Party primary next year. Kim told me that he’s considering a run for lieutenant governor. His focus for now, he said, will be on making sure that accountability extends beyond Cuomo. “It involves the entire orbit and ecosystem, not just Cuomo,” he said. “We’re talking about lobbyists, nonprofits, liberal politicians who knew what was going on but looked the other way. Everyone. Without being honest about the people who validated and propped up Cuomo for years, we’re going to repeat the same mistakes, we’re going to elevate the same type of toxic, dominating men into positions of power.” One reform Kim would like to see implemented is term limits for the governor’s office. “This is the moment to get that done,” he said.

Cuomo indicated in his speech that his resignation would take effect two weeks from Tuesday. “I think two weeks is completely unnecessary,” Boylan told me. “I will not fully believe it until he’s actually gone. I will not rest easier until he’s gone.” She plans to file a lawsuit against the Governor and people who worked for him. “It’s not an intent to sue,” Boylan told me. “I’m going to be suing. What I need is for this world to change with respect to women and what they experience when they come forward. The fact that I was retaliated against is both unacceptable and unlawful, and I feel it’s my duty to do this in order to help, in some small way, change my piece of the world. So that is what it’s about.”

Bennett first came forward in an interview with the Times that was published on February 27th. She told me that she’d kept a count in her head of the number of days since. Tuesday had been the hundred and sixty-fourth day. While she waited for a resolution, she felt that her life had been, in many ways, on pause. And, considering what it took for the Governor to resign, she said, she viewed this week’s events as more of a first step than an end point. “He was not resigning because he knows he acted inappropriately,” she said. “He knows he acted inappropriately. He resigned because he had no next move to make. And, in that sense, we have a lot of work to do.”