A former aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has accused him of intimidation and sexual harassment, expanding the allegations he filed in December. In a trial published in Medium on Wednesday, the former staff member accused the governor of “going out of his way” by touching her “lower back, arms and legs” and kissing her. the during an individual meeting.
Lindsey Boylan, the former chief of staff of the New York State Economic Agency, said the governor had an “uncomfortable” interest in her after she was appointed to the role in 2015. “My boss soon left me. reported that the governor had a “love affair” “about me,” he wrote, saying the director of the governor’s offices told him that Cuomo suggested he “look for pictures of Lisa Shields – his rumored ex-girlfriend – because” we could be sisters “and I was” the best sister. “”
“The governor started calling me‘ Lisa ’in front of classmates,” he wrote. “It was degrading.”
Boylan, who is now running for president of the Manhattan district, wrote in a series of December tweets that Cuomo “sexually harassed me for years.”
“I could never foresee what to expect: I would be grilled for my work (which was very good) or harassed by my looks. Or would they both be in the same conversation? That was it for years,” he wrote.
The governor denied the allegations at the time. “It’s not true,” he said during regular programming Press conference. “I fought and I think a woman has a right to come forward and express her opinion and express issues and concerns she has. But it’s just not true.”
His office again denied the allegations Wednesday. “As we said before, Ms. Boylan’s allegations of misconduct are simply false,” press secretary Caitlin Girouard said in a statement. Girouard said Boylan’s memory of a 2017 flight to the governor’s jet, in which he claimed to have suggested he played poker, cannot be true because flight records do not match his account of who was on board.
“He was sitting looking at me, so close that his knees almost touched. His press assistant was to my right and a state soldier behind us,” Boylan said of the experience. Girouard said “there was no flight where Lindsey was alone with the governor, a sole press aide and a New York soldier.”
Cuomo’s press secretary shared what she said was the governor’s schedule from October 2017, listing all passengers on his flights, as well as a statement from other aides about the trips. “We were on each of those October flights and that conversation didn’t happen,” said senior adviser to Governor John Maggiore, president and CEO of Empire State Development Howard Zemsky, Cuomo’s former communications director. , Dani Lever, and former press secretary Abbey Fashouer Collins in a statement.
Boylan said he for a long time “tried to excuse” the governor’s behavior, but could no longer after he gave her an unsolicited kiss during a private meeting at his New York City office. According to Boylan, the governor “passed in front of her” as he came out of his office and kissed her on the lips. “I was shocked, but I was still walking,” he wrote.
Boylan said he walked past Cuomo’s executive secretary’s desk as he left his office and said he was “scared to have seen the kiss.”
“The idea that someone might think I had my high-ranking office because of the governor’s‘ falling in love ’with me was more degrading than the kiss itself,” he added.
Boylan claimed the governor’s “widespread harassment” was not limited to her. According to Boylan, the governor also “made unflattering comments about the weight of colleagues … ridiculed them about their romantic relationships and other significant people” and “said the reasons men get women they were “money and power.”
“Governor Andrew Cuomo has created a culture within his administration where harassment and sexual harassment are so pervasive that they are not only tolerated, but expected,” Boylan wrote. “His inappropriate behavior with women was to claim that he liked her, that you had to do something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak, you would have consequences.”
Boylan wrote in his essay Medium that he was motivated to go public after learning that Cuomo was being considered the Attorney General of the United States. “Seeing his name float as a potential candidate for U.S. attorney general (the country’s top police chief) woke me up,” he said.
“In a few tweets, I explained to the world what some close friends, family and my therapist had known for years: Andrew Cuomo abused his power as governor to sexually harass me, as he had done with so many others women”. she wrote.
“I know some will eliminate my experience as trivial. We are used to powerful men misbehaving when no one is looking at it. But what about us when everyone is looking and no one is saying anything?”
In response to Boylan’s rehearsal, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik called for Cuomo’s resignation. “Sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the workplace is not a political problem, it is right and wrong. Governor Cuomo must resign immediately,” Stefanik wrote in a statement posted on Twitter. “… Any elected official who does not immediately demand his resignation is complicit.”
Stefanik is not the first New York lawmaker to call for an end to Cuomo’s term. Congressman Ron Kim defends the impeachment, saying the governor threatened him after Kim pressured his office to obtain “hidden” data on residency deaths during the pandemic.
“This is not a dispute between two people, but their ongoing efforts to implicate other lawmakers with lies and a cover-up of their deadly unilateral policies during this pandemic,” Kim wrote in the New York Daily News. “The governor’s attempt to force me to lie for his administration should be the last straw.”
The FBI and Brooklyn federal prosecutors do opened an investigation on how the Cuomo administration managed nursing home residents who contracted COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic.