It was not a development I could have predicted, notoriously arrogant and paternalistic 63-year-old politicians not generally having been my bag. Yet 16 months ago, along with many of my fellow New Yorkers, I fell for Andrew Cuomo.
My ardour was particularly alarming since I’d never been a fan — the brash, macho, Machiavellian governor of New York had a reputation for bullying and an ignominious record for blocking issues of importance to me, such as reproductive health, criminal justice reform and the legalisation of marijuana, the potential tax from which could fix the filthy, crumbling New York Subway.
However, in those chaotic, terrifying early days of the pandemic last spring, sequestered alone in my Brooklyn apartment, I found myself thirstily tuning in to Cuomo’s daily 11am live streamed briefings. The broadcasts, in which he delivered the latest morbid death data on jazzy PowerPoint slides, became the focus of my day, his stern, strict but soothing leadership a salve to my spiralling anxiety.
That patriarchal machismo I had loathed for so long I suddenly found reassuring. To some, he became an unlikely pin-up. Legions of city dwellers declared themselves “Cuomosexuals”, defined by the Urban Dictionary as: “Someone who has a deep, abiding affection, or attraction bordering on obsession, for a person carrying the surname Cuomo.”
Now, I admit, I feel a bit ashamed for being swept along in the pro-Cuomo clamour. However, unlike in the cases of many powerful men felled since the start of the #MeToo movement, one thing I haven’t felt is surprise. Cuomo’s comeuppance, if indeed this turns out to be that, feels entirely predictable.
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On Tuesday, the New York attorney’s office released a 165-page report corroborating the allegations of sexual harassment brought against Cuomo over the past 12 months, allegations which he has consistently met with denials, rebuttals and firm refusals to stand down.
The report details the allegations of 11 women — nine of them present or former employees in the New York state government — who share notably similar stories of inappropriate touching, inappropriate questions and unwelcome sexual advances. The investigators also interviewed 179 witnesses, 41 of whom testified under oath, and amassed “thousands’’ of documents of evidence. The governor himself was interviewed for 11 hours.
Even if the ever-ebullient Cuomo can withstand the weight of all that, it seems unlikely that he can resist pressure from the president; his old friend and political ally, Joe Biden, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “I think he should resign.” At the time of writing, however, the governor still denies making inappropriate sexual advances and has not resigned.
His father, another former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, was once dubbed “Hamlet on the Hudson” after keeping two planes on the runway at the airport while he decided whether to run for president. His son’s fall from favour now feels equally Shakespearean.
By April 2020, the death toll in New York was hitting almost 600 a day. The cacophony of ambulance sirens was ceaseless. Refrigerated trucks in residential streets acted as temporary morgues and tented field hospitals were rapidly erected in Central Park. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, Donald Trump was still playing down the pandemic, insisting it would miraculously “disappear”, and failing to establish any sort of coherent coronavirus response.
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It’s hardly surprising, then, that Cuomo and his daily briefings, imparting facts, graphs and hard data along with fatherly wisecracks and words of gentle reassurance, became our collective hero. Maybe we’d been wrong about him all this time? Cometh the hour, cometh the capable, comforting daddy we all craved.
Then, just as suddenly, it all seemed to go to his head. Last summer, he commissioned some strange collectible art portraying him as some sort of Messiah in mixed media. Even as evidence emerged that he’d deliberately obfuscated the figures for coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, he penned a somewhat premature memoir, America’s Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, published in October 2020, a month before America’s catastrophic second wave.
Then came the accusations. In December, Lindsey Boylan, a former executive in the state’s economic development department, published claims on the platform Medium that Cuomo casually touched her waist, back and legs, told her that she looked like a former girlfriend of his, and sometimes called her by that girlfriend’s name. He also, she claimed, kissed her on the lips after a meeting. Another woman, Anna Ruch, 33, who did not work for Cuomo, alleged that he had kissed her too, after she met him at a wedding.
They were followed in February by Charlotte Bennett, who worked as an executive assistant to Cuomo until last autumn and claimed that he told her he was lonely and wanted a girlfriend, and asked her what she thought about age gaps in relationships — she was 25 at the time.
Cuomo, she says, told her he was open to a relationship with anyone “22 and up”. Karen Hinton, a former press aide, then claimed he had drawn her into a “too intimate hug”, while Anna Liss, who worked for the governor for two years, alleged that he had kissed her hand and asked if she was dating.
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Other women said that he had groped them, asked them to sit on his lap, and made suggestive comments while they tested him for Covid-19. While the accusations snowballed, Cuomo and his spokespeople batted them off: he always kisses people, they claimed; it’s part of his greeting.
Usually, when public figures are pilloried, particularly in cases of sexual impropriety, a cheer squad is rapidly corralled to knock back the negative claims and pipe up with some positives on their character. There was no cheer squad for Cuomo. The silence from peers was deafening. It was notable that nobody was sticking their head above the parapet to defend him.
Among my New York friends too, none found the claims hard to believe. Cuomo was, we concluded, probably the person we’d always thought he was before his heroic pandemic profile. A man who once jokingly told reporters standing too close that “we need space or I’ll bring you all up on charges under the Me Too movement”, and who in 2018 opened a Women for Cuomo election drive event by remarking: “What a pleasure to be here, one of the few men in a room full of women.”
Today, there’s a roiling anger among my female friends, who are incensed by “liberals who masquerade as pro-women and then pull this kind of shit” and “yet another reminder of the power structure in the US and the assumed privilege of the ruling white male who believes himself to be untouchable”.
Should Cuomo resign? Absolutely — a less arrogant, egotistical leader would have done the decent thing down months ago. But facts can be held in tension; two things can be true at the same time. Cuomo can still, I believe (somewhat unpopularly among my friends) be the masterful leader our city needed in a moment of chaos — and a national leadership vacuum — and a persistent, defiant, disappointing sexual harasser.
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How history will choose to remember Cuomo and his 40-year career, only time will tell, but one arbiter of culture has already judged. Anyone searching for “Cuomosexual” on the Urban Dictionary now will find that creature defined as: “In love with an incompetent, gropey, hyper-corrupt governor who has an atrocious Covid track record and a history of questionable sexual behaviour.”
