Lindsey Boylan, former adviser to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and current candidate for president of the borough of Manhattan, revealed last Wednesday details about the alleged harassment she suffered during the four years she worked for the governor.
Boylan, who became deputy secretary of the Department of Economic Development before leaving the governor’s office in 2018, said last December that the politician had “sexually harassed for years”.
When Boylan made the allegations public, Cuomo said: “I fully respect the right of women, I fought for the right of women to express any concern, any problem they have in the workplace. I support that, but the tweets are just not true.”
Boylan accusations to Cuomo
In a letter published in “Medium”, Lindsey Boylan maintains that on one occasion in October 2017 the governor proposed to her to play “strip poker”, a variant of the card game in which the loser must remove clothes and that in another he kissed her on the lips.
“We were flying home from an event in western New York in October 2017 on his tax-paid plane. He was sitting across from me, so close that our knees were almost touching. His press aide was on my right and there was a state trooper behind us.“
-Boylan wrote, who assured that he responded with sarcasm and surprise: “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Boylan says in her letter that on another occasion in 2018, when she was alone with the governor in his office, Cuomo kissed her on the lips.
“I was shocked, but kept walking”, she writes before telling that her greatest concern at that time was that no one had seen him so that they would not think that her promotion was due to the “attraction” that the governor felt for her.
In September of that year, she resigned because, she says, she could no longer bear the situation.
Cuomo staff deny accusations
Shortly after the brief was published, the governor’s press secretary, Caitlin Girouard, denied Boylan’s allegations, stressing: “as we said before, Mrs. Boylan’s accusations of inappropriate behavior (by Cuomo) are simply false”.
In a statement, Girouard offered the data of four flights shared by Boylan and Cuomo in October 2017 and assured that the four people who shared a plane with them, identified as John Maggiore, Howard Zemsky, Dani Lever and Abbey Fashouer Collins agreed that “Said conversation did not occur.”
Other accusations are added
Karen Hinton, Bill de Blasio’s former press secretary, who wrote about her work for Cuomo in 1995 when she was federal housing secretary, said the governor made an odd proposal, according to CBS2.
“He made me feel like I was not good at my job and therefore totally depended on him to keep it up.” Hinton wrote.
“Working for him is like a 1950s version of marriage. He always, always, always comes first. Everyone and everything else, your actual spouse, your children, your own career goals, is secondary. Your attention 24 hours a day is on it”, added.
The governor, who is in his third term, is facing mounting pressure over the more than 15,000 COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
His government was forced to revise the figure up from 8,500 deaths when a report from the state prosecutor of New York noted that he had underestimated the number by several thousand.