Cuomo's First Accuser Raises New Claims of Harassment and Retaliation

[brooklynite]

Source: New YORKER

On the morning of December 13, 2020, Lindsey Boylan sat in the passenger seat of her family’s car, with her husband at the wheel and her six-year-old daughter in the back. She began typing a series of tweets on her phone. Boylan, a former special adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, had felt increasingly troubled as press reports mentioned Cuomo as a potential Attorney General in the Biden Administration. For more than a year, she had been raising allegations on Twitter that Cuomo presided over a hostile and toxic workplace, initially drawing little attention. A week before, Boylan had tweeted again, and another former Cuomo employee had reached out to her privately, to share a story of being sexually harassed by the Governor. “I felt really responsible for what happened to this woman, because I didn’t do something about it,” Boylan told me, in her first detailed interview about her allegations. She saw the stories about Cuomo’s political prospects as a cause for urgency.

In the car, she began tweeting allegations that Cuomo had sexually harassed her, too. “@NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched,” she wrote. She referenced harassment about her looks and described an unpredictable and intimidating workplace experience. Her husband became aware of the tweets only as the reaction began to build online. “I felt like I was just exploded,” Boylan recalled. “And he felt like he was having a heart attack.”

As Boylan’s disclosures began to draw notice on social media, a group of current and former Cuomo staffers who served as his informal crisis-communications brain trust moved to squash them “in real time,” according to one person with direct knowledge of the effort. Members of that group included Melissa DeRosa, a senior aide; Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson; and Steven M. Cohen, a former secretary to the Governor. They circulated Boylan’s tweets and held a series of urgent calls. The group had just emerged from a frantic effort to respond to allegations that Cuomo’s office had deliberately undercounted covid-related deaths in New York nursing homes. They were “putting that to bed, and then she pipes up. And then it’s sort of a big scramble,” the person with direct knowledge of the effort told me. “It was, like, what the hell do we do about this?” Cuomo’s advisers arrived at a plan to leak Boylan’s personnel records, which included allegations that Boylan had bullied colleagues, some of them women of color. “The decision was made collectively,” the person with direct knowledge of the effort said. “That these are facts, the reporters should see them.”

An intermediary who says that he was not on the calls, Rich Bamberger, a former communications director for Cuomo who now works for the public-relations firm Kivvit, called several reporters and advised them to contact the Governor’s office. According to the person with knowledge of the conversations, Azzopardi then sent Boylan’s personnel files to reporters. By day’s end, several of the complaints about Boylan had appeared in stories, by the Associated Press, the New York Post, and the Albany-based Times Union. Boylan recalled being stunned by the articles. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe,” she said. In the ensuing days, Cuomo aides began contacting people who had worked under Boylan—which some of the recipients found intimidating, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Cuomo advisers also considered releasing a letter attacking Boylan’s credibility and reputation, drafts of which were first reported by the Times this week. They ultimately decided against releasing the letter. “My life was, you know, for a period, destroyed,” Boylan told me. In a statement, Beth Garvey, Cuomo’s acting counsel, said, “With certain limited exceptions, as a general matter, it is within a government entity’s discretion to share redacted employment records, including in instances when members of the media ask for such public information and when it is for the purpose of correcting inaccurate or misleading statements.”

Boylan’s allegations largely faded from public view, until last month, when she posted a detailed account of her experience on Medium. Boylan told me, during a series of lengthy interviews, that she decided to disclose her allegations via online posts and initially declined interview requests from journalists because “having someone dissect my trauma is not something I wanted.” She said that the essay took her more than a month to write. “I realized I had to own this experience,” she told me. “It was something I was going to have to talk about eventually.” A series of disclosures about Cuomo from other women, including multiple allegations of harassment and one of groping, quickly followed Boylan’s. “Seeing Lindsey’s story was a huge factor in my decision to come forward,” Charlotte Bennett, a former Cuomo staffer who began publicly discussing her account of sexual harassment by the Governor after Boylan’s Medium post, told me. “Coming forward didn’t feel like a choice—it felt like my responsibility to validate Lindsey’s story and signal to others that it was O.K. to come forward.”

Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cuomos-first-accuser-raises-new-claims-of-harassment-and-retaliation