The bad headlines around Governor Andrew Cuomo continued to pile up over the weekend, with a pair of reports detailing new accounts of his inappropriate behavior and the volatile workplace environment he cultivated over three decades of public service. The reports published Saturday by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal bring the tally of women who have come forward with accounts of Cuomo’s inappropriate remarks or unwelcome physical contact to five. Ana Liss, a former policy and operations aide to Cuomo between 2013 and 2015, said the governor “asked her 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,” the Journal reported Saturday. Also on Saturday, Karen Hinton, who worked for Cuomo as a press aide in the 1990s when he was the U.S. housing secretary, told the Post that the governor requested she come to his hotel room after a work event in 2000 and asked her a slew of personal questions before approaching her when she got up to leave in an embrace that Hinton described as “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate.” She said she pulled away only to have the governor pull her back towards him “for another intimate embrace,” at which point Hinton said she recoiled and left the room.
Responding to Hinton’s account, Peter Ajemian, Cuomo’s director of communications, firmly denied the episode taking place and suggested that Hinton was operating in bad faith. “Karen Hinton is a known antagonist of the Governor’s who is attempting to take advantage of this moment to score cheap points with made up allegations from 21 years ago,” Ajemian said in a statement. “All women have the right to come forward and tell their story—however, it’s also the responsibility of the press to consider self-motivation. This is reckless.” Cuomo’s office also dismissed the behavior raised by Liss, with spokesperson Rich Azzopardi saying: “Reporters and photographers have covered the governor for 14 years watching him kiss men and women and posing for pictures” and “that’s what people in politics do,” per the Journal. Last week, the governor said at a press conference that his “usual custom is to kiss and to hug and make that gesture.” He denied touching women “inappropriately” but said he understood “that sensitivities have changed and behavior has changed, and I get it. And I’m going to learn from it.”
While Hinton was at the time no longer working for HUD in a full-time capacity, instead serving as a consultant for the agency, she reportedly described the encounter as a “power play” for “manipulation and control.” Other female staffers echoed that interpretation in their accounts of working in Cuomo’s office, with some characterizing the governor’s probing questions about their personal lives not as sexual entreaties but as attempts to assert dominance. Current and former staffers told both the Post and the Journal that Cuomo’s manipulation tactics ranged from making inappropriate comments about their physical appearance and personal lives to unwelcome physical contact, including in front of others during meetings. One woman identified as a high-ranking HUD political appointee recalled her embarrassment to the Post when, after only about three weeks on the job, the governor hugged and kissed her on the cheek while greeting her during a meeting with an official from the Treasury Department. “It completely diminished me, of course, in the eyes of this person. I have no doubt about that,” she said, describing it not as a sexual kiss but “more like a power trip.” Another female staffer who worked for Cuomo in the governor’s office remembered him making a comment during a group meeting that a male staffer should date her, the Post reports.
Male staffers, too, were reportedly subject to Cuomo’s degradation. Two male aides said that they were on the receiving end of frequent verbal attacks while working for the governor, including Cuomo calling them “pussies” and saying, “You have no balls,” in line with the broader humiliating environment that former Cuomo staffers and advisers—speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution—recounted to the Post. He “seemed to delight in humiliating his employees, particularly in group meetings, and would mock male aides for not being tough enough,” the outlet reports. The Journal reports that all of the more than 30 former or current Cuomo officials they spoke with described the governor’s office as a “high-pressure environment,” with several characterizing it as toxic. The Post spoke to more than 20 people who have worked with the New York Democrat from the 1990s to the present, many of whom described their experiences as a constant dance around the mercurial governor, who vacillated between charming staffers one moment and verbally abusing them the next. “Not even my own parents had ever yelled at me the way he yelled at me,” one woman who worked at HUD as a political appointee when Cuomo ran the agency said, telling the Post that Cuomo at one point yelled at her so loudly in his office that colleagues came in to check on her.
The new allegations follow another week of scandal for the governor, as twin reports from the New York Times and the Journal disclosed new information about the other crisis engulfing Cuomo: how New York handled the COVID-19 outbreak in nursing homes, and steps taken to misrepresent the number of deaths in such facilities. Both outlets last week reported that a number of Cuomo’s top advisers rewrote a New York State Health Department report to conceal how many nursing home residents died from the coronavirus, intervention that came as Cuomo was starting to write his book American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic—despite the fact the pandemic was, and is, ongoing. Federal investigators are looking into the administration’s nursing home data scandal, and state attorney general Letitia James is leading a probe into the sexual harassment claims raised by two former aides. Lindsey Boylan said Cuomo tried to kiss her on the lips and proposed they play strip poker during a 2017 flight on his plane, allegations Cuomo’s office has denied, and Charlotte Bennett accused Cuomo of “predatory behavior” while she worked in his office and detailed a series of uncomfortable encounters and comments, including his trying to gauge her sexual interest in older men and asking invasive questions about whether her prior experience with sexual assault hindered her capacity for intimacy. Another woman, Anna Ruch, described an unwelcome advance with Cuomo when she met him for the first time at a wedding—an interaction corroborated by photos from the event.
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