Melissa DeRosa opens up in new book on Cuomo, the pandemic and the prank Trump wanted to pull in the Oval Office

Melissa DeRosa says her new memoir isn’t about settling any scores. Instead, the former secretary to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) says “What’s Left Unsaid” is focused on “setting the record straight.”

“When you live through something, the real-time reporting is sort of the first draft of history. And then I think the second draft of history is told by firsthand, primary sources who lived through things,” says DeRosa.

DeRosa indisputably lived through a lot — from the governor’s famed daily press briefings that became “must-see” TV during the pandemic, to criticism and cover-up accusations over his handling of nursing homes and their COVID-19 death rates, to Cuomo’s 2021 resignation following allegations of sexual harassment.

“In this situation, this was a once-in-a-century pandemic — New York was the global epicenter of it,” DeRosa said of her job as Cuomo’s top aide, the first woman to serve in the role.

“We experienced so much during that period in terms of the shortcomings of government, and what it took to lead in that moment. And I think that so much of it got lost in sort of the fog of COVID,” said DeRosa.

“And then, 2021 happened, and I felt like that story needed to be told, too, and the truth behind that story needed to be told. So this, for me, I felt like it was a responsibility that I had to the public, to my administration and to myself: to tell this story from a firsthand perspective.”

DeRosa said she took copious notes on the job because she recognized “the gravity of what we were living through” during the pandemic. She started writing her book within a week of her resignation.

The briefings by Cuomo, DeRosa wrote in her book, released Tuesday, were borne out of his belief that “if the people understood what was going on, they would choose to do what we asked them to do.”

“People were traumatized, and the governor believed it was vital to give them a sense of stability in an otherwise out-of-control world,” DeRosa wrote.

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She also opened up about her personal life, detailing the breakdown of her marriage and her struggle with infertility. She spoke about some of her unlikely across-the-aisle relationships, such as her friendship with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), before DeRosa said politics blew it up.

DeRosa said she met her schoolmate Stefanik in eighth grade, and the pair “clicked immediately.”

“Our shared experiences and the challenges we faced as young women in a male-dominated industry created a bond that time, distance, and ideological differences were able to transcend,” DeRosa wrote.

But after Stefanik became one of former President Trump’s strongest allies in the House and fiercely criticized the Cuomo’s administration plan to redistribute ventilators in the Empire State, DeRosa said she berated the lawmaker in a phone call.

“I am embarrassed to be associated with you,” she recalled telling Stefanik, dubbing the congresswoman a “partisan hack.”

“That was the last time Elise and I ever spoke,” DeRosa told ITK in an interview.

“I’m not sure I ever anticipate the two of us speaking again, which actually, frankly, it’s sad.”

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“I think that Elise and I are sort of a reflection of what’s happened to America writ large in the Trump and post-Trump and continuing Trump era, where I feel like so many friendships, families — it never used to be this way, that you could not be friends with people that you disagree with politically. And I think Trump sort of changed that,” DeRosa said.

A Tuesday statement to ITK from Alex DeGrasse, Stefanik’s senior adviser, referred to DeRosa as Cuomo’s “disgraced sycophant henchwoman assistant.”

“The good news for everyone in New York is that the career and life of this D-List ‘author’ have been deservedly destroyed by her own vicious actions and this desperately false Mean Girls burn book of smears will sell even less copies than Andrew Cuomo’s basement bargain tome of trash,” DeGrasse said, a reference to the then-governor’s 2020 COVID-19 memoir, “American Crisis.”

“Good riddance,” the statement added.

Beyond the friendship-ending political fights, there were also a handful of lighter moments along the way. DeRosa accompanied Cuomo in 2018 to the White House to meet with then-President Trump about infrastructure funding. The 41-year-old Cornell University graduate recalled that during a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump wanted to play a trick on the governor’s younger brother, then-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.

“That was my first real experience going to the White House and meeting with a president of the United States in the Oval Office,” she said. “And you have sort of this vision, growing up watching ‘West Wing’ and revering the White House. … And we walk in and Trump’s like ‘Oh, you know what would be fun? Let’s prank call your brother, Chris! What’s his number?’”

“I’m like, ‘What the hell is happening?’” DeRosa remembered of the experience with a laugh. Trump ultimately didn’t follow through with his phone stunt.

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DeRosa wrote in the book that her father, a lobbyist, taught her from a young age to “think of politics as a contact sport.”

“You’re on a team and almost always playing against another: Democrats vs. Republicans, House vs. Senate, executive vs. legislative. The press, he explained, played the role of referee,” he told her.

But DeRosa accused the media of chasing ratings rather than news value.

While Cuomo’s team relished its “reputation for being hard-charging” with the press, DeRosa said, in hindsight, “That’s one of the things that I think if I could do over again, I would have recalibrated differently.”

“When everything is an emergency,” DeRosa said of her relationship with reporters, “nothing is an emergency.”

She said she hopes “What’s Left Unsaid” leaves readers with a hopeful message: “In life, sometimes you get knocked down — whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s a scandal, whether it’s a divorce, whether it’s issues with trying to conceive, whatever it is — but you have to get back up and keep fighting.”

DeRosa predicted Cuomo reentering the political world would not be “out of the question,” but said while she would support him in another political run, she wouldn’t work for the ex-governor again.

“I think it’s time for me to chart my own course,” she said.

—Updated at 4:52 p.m.

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