Gov. Andrew Cuomo had someone else take his mandatory sexual harassment training course on sexual harassment, and then signed it off as if he had done it himself, according to prosecutor Charlotte Bennett, in a new interview. Friday night.
Bennett also claims that one of the governor’s top aides granted him last summer that he had been “fixing” him, but that the matter did not need further investigation because Cuomo’s behavior had not gone further.
The explosive revelations were made by 25-year-old Cuomo’s former aide in an interview on “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell.”
“At first they apologized, they said it was inappropriate,” she said of a June 30 meeting with Cuomo’s special counsel, Judith Mogul, and her chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers.
“I asked them if they could let it go, saying,‘ I don’t want it to be investigated, please let it go, ’you know, because I was scared.
“She said,‘ You beat us before anything serious happened. It was just preparation and not yet considered sexual harassment, so there is no need to investigate, ”Bennett alleged.
It was unclear whether Bennett was referring to Mogul, Desrosiers or anyone at the meeting.
Cuomo had a stamp take away his official training, Bennett also alleged.
“In 2019 he didn’t do the sexual harassment training,” Bennett tells O’Donnell in the interview.
“How do you know that?” O’Donnell asks.
“I was there,” replies Bennett, who was working for him at the time.
“I heard Stephanie say,‘ I can’t believe I’m doing this for you guys, ’” Bennett recalls, referring to office manager Stephanie Benton.
“I’m kidding about the fact that she was completing training for him,” Bennett recalls.
“And then I heard her at the end asking her to sign the certificate,” Bennett said.
Bennett’s explosive claim that the governor had an aide who completed his sexual harassment training directly contradicts what he said Wednesday.
When asked by a journalist if he had taken compulsory training, Cuomo simply said, “The short answer is yes.”
Benton, meanwhile, “categorically denies the exchange,” according to a statement from the governor’s office adding, “That’s not true,” CBS reported.
Also in the interview, Bennett said the governor instructed him to “find” a girlfriend; then, a day later, he asked impatiently if he had done so, a revelation that sparked previews on Friday.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Bennett’s attorney, Debra Katz, sent a letter to the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, asking the GA to make sure the evidence related to the sexual harassment claims of Bennett were kept in the governor’s office and senior staff.
The urgency of Katz’s request “intensified with recent new reports that the governor’s staff modified government reports related to other matters,” the lawyer said in a press release.
This was an apparent reference to Thursday night’s news that Cuomo’s top advisers pushed state health officials to omit from a public report the number of nursing home residents who died in hospitals due to the COVID-19.