AG: Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women, broke state and federal law

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed nearly a dozen women, including current and former aides, touching some without their consent and leaving many fearful of retaliation, according to a devastating new report from state Attorney General Tish James.

The report, which concludes the three-term Democratic governor violated federal and state laws, sends Cuomo’s political future further into chaos and raises anew the prospect that he could be forced from office in coming months.

James and the two attorneys she directed to lead a more than four-month investigation — Joon Kim and Anne Clark — announced on Tuesday that Cuomo’s actions constituted a toxic culture of harassment and fear, a culture described in painstaking detail in a 168-page report. The investigation corroborates accusations that had led President Joe Biden to say the governor should step aside if the claims were found to be true.

“All of them experienced harassing conduct from the governor,” Kim said Tuesday. “Some suffered through unwanted touching and grabbing of their most intimate body parts. Others suffered through repeated offensive, sexually suggestive, or gender-based comments. A number of them endured both. None of them welcomed it, and all of them found it disturbing, humiliating, uncomfortable and inappropriate. And now we find that it was unlawful sex-based harassment.”

Shortly after James' press conference concluded, Cuomo aired a pre-taped message denying the allegations and saying the investigation — which he called for and authorized — was politically motivated.

“I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” the governor said. Of one particular allegation brought by an anonymous woman whose attorney has threatened legal action, Cuomo said, “I welcome the opportunity for a full and fair review before a jury."

James said the release of the report marked the end of her office’s involvement and said it would be up to prosecutors and the state Legislature to pursue criminal or political consequences for the governor’s actions. The Assembly has already launched an impeachment inquiry, and police in Albany are said to be investigating an allegation that Cuomo groped the breast of an aide.

“The findings contained in the report are disturbing. The details provided by the victims are gut-wrenching. Our hearts go out to all the individuals who have had to endure this horrible experience,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said in a statement. “The conduct by the Governor outlined in this report would indicate someone who is not fit for office. … We will now undertake an in-depth examination of the report and its corresponding exhibits with our Assembly counsels as well the legal firm we have retained to assist us."

James said while the report reveals “a deeply disturbing yet clear picture” of the governor’s actions, “the matter is civil in nature, and does not have any criminal consequences," though she said it would be in the purview of other prosecutors to pursue criminal charges.

“Our understanding is that for the young woman whose breast was groped, that the Albany Police Department already has a report about that,” Clark said. “All the information is fully documented in the report, and any prosecutors or police departments can look at the evidence to determine if they will take further action. … The women can decide — some of them can decide — themselves if they want to bring a civil action.”

In a subsequent statement, James said she had referred her office's findings to the state Assembly, where impeachment proceedings would originate.

“At the Assembly’s request, we have provided the Assembly Judiciary Committee with the report that was released today, and we will provide them with all relevant evidence," she said. "We will cooperate with their investigation as needed.”

Cuomo showed a montage of photos of him kissing and hugging politicians and said his gestures were part of generational and cultural customs. He repeated that the investigation into his actions was politically motivated.

"Politics and bias are interwoven throughout every aspect of this situation. One would be naive to think otherwise. And New Yorkers are not naive. I understand these dynamics," he said. "And for those who were using this moment to score political points or seek publicity or personal gain, I say they actually discredit the legitimate actual harassment victims that the law was designed to protect."

The investigation entailed over 74,000 documents, 179 interviews — 41 of which were under oath — and ultimately detailed allegations from 11 people, including one state trooper assigned to Cuomo’s protective detail. They were not isolated incidents, they were “part of a pattern,” Kim said during the announcement. Clark said investigators “found all 11 women to be credible” with varying degrees of “corroboration.”

“I believe women, and I believe these 11 women,” James said.

Top-level Cuomo staffers were also implicated for their roles in creating a culture of fear and intimidation within the Cuomo administration, as well as failing to properly report harassment complaints according to state policy, James said.

James, Kim and Clark highlighted testimony of several staffers to illustrate a “disturbing pattern of conduct” and secrecy that pervaded the executive chamber.

“[W]hat makes it so hard to describe every single inappropriate incident is the culture of the place,” executive assistant Alyssa McGrath told investigators, according to the report. “He makes all this inappropriate and creepy behavior normal and like you should not complain. On the other hand, you see people get punished and screamed at if you do anything where you disagree with him or his top aides. I really just wanted to go to work and be recognized for my work and nothing else.”

Cuomo himself has denied that he did anything wrong, and in recent weeks his top staff have begun to paint the investigation and the attorneys conducting it as politically motivated, which James critiqued on Tuesday.

“There were attempts to undermine and to politicize this investigation,” James said. “There were attacks on me as well as members of the team, which I find offensive.”

Clark on Tuesday said that during Cuomo’s 11-hour testimony last week, the governor attempted to put his own “spin” on some of the allegations and rejected others.

“He denied touching the state trooper, although he said he might have kissed her at an event, and there were certain things that he turned around and said, for example, the executive assistant number one, that he did hug her repeatedly, but claimed she was the one who initiated the hugs,” Clark said.

The report’s conclusions are certain to revive calls for Cuomo’s immediate resignation or, if he refuses to step down, his impeachment. Many of Cuomo’s fellow Democrats, including both of the state’s U.S. senators, as well as state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and more than 50 of her legislative colleagues, called on Cuomo to quit several months ago amid a cascade of harassment accusations against him.

Biden said that Cuomo should resign if the allegations were proven by the attorney general’s report. “Yes, I think he’ll probably end up being prosecuted, too,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in March. He said he would address questions about the allegations later on Tuesday afternoon.

The state Assembly’s Judiciary Committee has been considering articles of impeachment for several months. The committee is looking into an array of allegations, ranging from sexual harassment to accusations that state workers were assigned to help him write his pandemic memoir, “American Crisis,” for which he was paid $5.1 million.

Cuomo said before the scandals broke that he intends to run for a fourth term in 2022.

Whether Cuomo should resign is a “political question,” James said, and at this point, “we’re going to allow the chips to fall where they may.”

The calls for Cuomo to resign began flooding in following the report's release Tuesday. Reps. Hakeem Jeffries, Gregory Meeks, and Tom Suozzi — among the few members of the New York Congressional delegations who had not previously called for Cuomo to resign — said he must step down. So did former Cuomo ally and Council Speaker Chris Quinn.

Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and long-time foe Mayor Bill de Blasio were among those to restate their calls for Cuomo to resign.

The report marks a nadir in Cuomo’s political career.

After rising to become one of the country’s most prominent leaders in the fight against Covid-19 — thanks in large part to his Emmy Award-winning daily televised news conferences and New York’s designation as the global epicenter for the viral outbreak — Cuomo’s pandemic halo began to tarnish in early 2021.

For months, lawmakers, reporters and Albany watchdogs had pressed the administration to release a full accounting of Covid-related deaths in long-term care facilities, including nursing home residents who died after being transferred to hospitals — a data point which the state Health Department did not release as part of its daily Covid death data. Questions over the administration’s data — and a public records fight for the information — percolated throughout 2020 in Albany, but did not gain much attention outside of health care circles until James released a late-January report accusing the state of drastically undercounting coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.

As Cuomo sought to salvage his Covid reputation by focusing on the state’s vaccine rollout, while also negotiating a new state budget, the governor soon found himself at the center of yet another — and perhaps more damaging — scandal: this time, over allegations that he engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior and sexual harassment.

Lindsey Boylan, who formerly worked for Cuomo and the state’s economic development agency, accused the then-embattled governor in a Feb. 24 Medium post of having kissed her without her consent and asking her to play strip poker. The allegations, which suggested a pattern of sexual harassment, came just two months after Boylan had accused the governor of workplace harassment on Twitter. Cuomo’s office denied Boylan’s allegations.

On Feb. 27, the governor faced new accusations from Charlotte Bennett, who began working for the state in March 2020. A day later, James and Cuomo’s office reached an agreement on how to investigate allegations of sexual harassment made against the governor.

Allegations against the governor continued to snowball as New York marked the one-year anniversary since its first recorded Covid case. Anna Ruch accused Cuomo in a March 1 New York Times report of making an inappropriate advance at a wedding.

Days later, Ana Liss, who worked as a policy and operations aide to Cuomo from 2013 to 2015, told The Wall Street Journal that the governor had “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.” That same day, The Washington Post reported that other former staffers had accused Cuomo of inappropriate workplace behavior.

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 Cuomo invited her to his hotel room in 2000 when she was working as a consultant and embraced her in a way she said was “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate.” The Times Union, meanwhile, reported on March 9 that another woman had accused Cuomo of touching her without consent during a late 2020 encounter at the governor's mansion.

Albany lawmakers pledged on March 11 to launch their own investigation into the governor’s behavior, marking the first step toward impeachment. Cuomo, meanwhile, retreated from the public eye, announcing Covid-related updates via releases or closed press events — a stark contrast from the daily briefings he had launched a year prior.

Reports of a wide-ranging federal investigation surfaced in Albany this spring, as clouds continued to gather around Cuomo amid new questions over his pandemic memoir. And March 4 reports from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal suggested that the Cuomo administration rewrote a Department of Health report to conceal the pandemic’s true death toll at long-term care facilities, contradicting public statements by allies of the governor.

The Assembly’s Judiciary Committee began examining the book deal, according to financial records released in mid-May. And state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli gave James the authority to investigate allegations about the book deal, including the possibility that he used taxpayer resources to write it. His office also announced that James does not need its referral to conduct a criminal investigation into Cuomo’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes.

Cuomo's top staffers, who have all reportedly been questioned in the probe, have in recent months sought to diminish the legitimacy of the investigation by regularly alleging to reporters and on Twitter that James is using it to further her own political ambitions. James has not publicly stated any intention to run for governor, nor have the two outside attorneys she hired to conduct an independent investigation.

The governor publicly questioned the trustworthiness of the lawyers leading James’ investigation shortly after he reportedly answered questions under oath from two lead investigators. “I have concerns as to the independence of the reviewers,” Cuomo said during a late July press event at Yankee Stadium. “Is this all happening in a political system? Yes, that is undeniable.”