A former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday provided new details to support her allegations of sexual harassment, including a complaint that New York’s top elected official kissed her “on the lips” without warning in her office. Manhattan.
Lindsey Boylan, now a Democratic candidate for president of the Manhattan district, made the impressive accusation in an essay posted on the Medium website.
Boylan said the incident took place after her promotion in 2018 to be Cuomo’s deputy secretary of economic development and the governor’s special adviser, a job she initially turned down “because she didn’t want to be around him.”
“We were at his New York City office on Third Avenue,” he wrote.
“When I got up to go out and walk to an open door, he passed in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I was still walking.
Boylan then wrote, “He came to work nausea every day,” and then resigned on September 26, 2018.
Boylan also alleges that Cuomo suggested, “Let’s play poker,” while “they were flying home from an October 2017 event in western New York with their taxpayer-funded plane.”
Cuomo made the comment as he and Boylan sat in front of each other, with his press assistant to his right “and a state soldier behind us,” according to his rehearsal.
“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,” he wrote.
Boylan made his claims after The Post’s recent revelation that Cuomo’s chief aide, Melissa DeRosa, privately admitted that her administration hid the total number of residents of the dead residences killed by COVID-19 from lawmakers and to the public for fear that federal prosecutors would use it “against us.”
The scoop on The Post has sparked Cuomo’s indictment and an investigation by the FBI and the Brooklyn Prosecutor’s Office.
In his more than 1,700-word essay, Boylan said DeRosa and “other first-rate women” around Cuomo “normalized” their alleged harassment, so “only now do I realize the insidious that was his abuse. “
Boylan also posted screenshots of government emails, including one in which Cuomo executive secretary Stephanie Benton allegedly sent her a message referring to an ex-girlfriend to show she was of her type.
“He said you were looking for Lisa Shields. You could be sisters. Unless you’re the prettiest sister, ”she said in the email on December 14, 2016.
Later, Boylan wrote, Cuomo “started calling me ‘Lisa’ in front of classmates. It was degrading.”
Another image shows an email exchange on November 1, 2016 in which Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, asked Howard Zemsky – then the state’s economic development tsar – if Boylan would attend. a meeting the next day.
Zemsky wrote again, “Ha!” and added that Boylan would be in Albany “but it will be difficult for him to concentrate on the presentations while worrying about how government day is going in Rochester.”
In his essay, Boylan also said that after accusing Cuomo of first-time sexual harassment in a series of tweets in December, “two women contacted me with their own experiences.”
“One described how he lived in constant fear, frightened of what would happen to him if he rejected the governor’s advances,” he wrote.
“The other said the governor gave him instructions to warn staff members who were bothering him that his jobs might be at risk. They both told me they were too scared to talk.”
When he initially accused Cuomo, Boylan did not provide any details of his alleged harassment and did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In a tweet on Wednesday, he said: “I never planned to share the details of my experience working in the Cuomo administration, but I do so now in the hope that it can make it easier for others to tell their own truth.” .
Cuomo’s office did not immediately return any request for comment, but the governor denied Boylan’s allegations in December.
“It’s not true,” Cuomo said during a press conference a day after his tweets.
“Look, I fought and I think a woman has the right to come forward and express her opinion and express her problems and concerns. But it is not true.