This fucking guy. This empty shirt, this morally bankrupt sack of hot air, this corrupt scion of unearned entitlement and utter fucking bullshit.
I’m speaking, of course, about New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, a man who couldn’t tell the truth, or do the right thing or even just pantomime anything remotely resembling humility if his life depended on it—and indeed, for once, it seems like his political life might.
New York Attorney General Tish James’ report investigating Cuomo’s misconduct against female employees and women he encountered because of his powerful position became public Tuesday morning, 168 pages plus three appendixes cataloguing interviews with nearly 200 people, many of whom wisely preserved documentation of their experiences, knowing full well that the notoriously manipulative and threatening governor would not go gently into any sort of good night.
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Some of the report’s details were known already, of course; the investigation itself was triggered by women bravely going public with their experiences, a necessity born of the toxic culture of machine politics in Albany, and New York more broadly, that has long protected Andrew Cuomo from any kind of comeuppance for his undeniable pattern of abusive, power-hungry and predatory behavior.
But there were new complaints, like that of a state trooper to whom Cuomo apparently took such a fancy, he literally changed the state’s laws to put her on his security detail despite her inexperience—or, as he told investigators, because he “was on constant alert to recruit more women, Blacks, and Asians to the state police detail.” After getting her on his security detail, the trooper had to deal with the governor commenting on her appearance, her sex drive and telling her that he was looking for a romantic partner who “can handle pain.” Some champion of diversity in the workplace.
The report is damning, horrifying and thorough. In response, the governor released a pre-recorded video, bravely fielding exactly zero questions from the press. He talked about how he’d learned to hug and kiss from his mom and dad, as though that was license to hug and kiss any staffer—or any New Yorker he came across, apparently—any time, before playing a slideshow of photos showing him kissing famous people over the years, which was apparently meant to serve as exculpatory evidence pardoning him from a wealth of allegations of groping and unwanted kissing in the workplace. He described himself as a champion of women, without really explaining why all these different women, many of them working for him, testified that he was creeping on them, making them feel small and intimidated and uncomfortable as they tried simply to do their jobs.
From beginning to end, the governor deployed every move in the scumbag playbook, enacting the abuser’s response of deny, attack and reverse victim and offender (DARVO) with such shamelessness, it’s almost breathtaking. From self-pitying blanket denials of the things he couldn’t explain away, to outing a family member as a victim of sexual assault to try and save his political career, to having the utter gall to hint at gossip about a brave young woman his youngest daughter’s age whom he harassed out of his office and suggesting that attempts to hold the bullying, enabling women on his staff accountable is sexism.
Seeing his sins finally catching up with him as the clock wound down, he left nothing on the field, truly exposing himself as a man who lacks any semblance of integrity and will say or do whatever it takes to cling to power.
As he spoke, he said that he had his own Cuomo Report coming out to rebut the Attorney General’s exhaustive, exhausting report about all of the women he harassed and demeaned, many of whom had been excited to be in public service before becoming unwilling victims of his repulsive attentions.
That report showed up an hour or so later, written by a lawyer paid from his campaign war-chest, a half-assed response with 30 pages of words opening with the false claim that his lawyers hadn’t had time to respond to the A.G.’s report as a way to “explain” why it doesn’t even try to respond to the Trooper or various other accusers, followed by 50 more pages of the same pictures of him hugging people in public plus shots of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama (who can’t be happy to be dragged into this) doing the same, and screengrabs of old, irrelevant Tweets from one of his accusers.
Spoiler: The lawyer paid by Cuomo to clear Cuomo concludes that Cuomo “has never conducted himself in that way” and claims the Attorney General’s report had a “predetermined outcome.” That report was published not on Cuomo’s campaign website, but on the website of the New York State governor’s office as an added “fuck you” to victims, his and others’. It’s a way for Cuomo to say that the rules don’t apply to him, and that he doesn’t intend to go anywhere.
The governor who proclaimed “I am the left” just two years ago intends to hold on, even as the Democratic party from Joe Biden on down is telling him to get lost.
Cuomo has always believed he is entitled to everything he wants, and that includes having it both ways, and a third way, too, ideally. How else do you explain his claim to be moved by compassion to interrogate Charlotte Bennett about her experience of assault, while also dismissing her to investigators as an unreliable witness of her own experience, saying that because of her experience as a sexual assault survivor, she “processed what she heard through her own filter”? Bennett says he was grooming her for sex. Cuomo, the state’s most powerful politician, has repeatedly suggested his investigators and accusers are motivated by politics.
Who had more motivation here to play politics: Women who were chased out of low-level positions by a creepy old governor and his enablers, or that governor?
Cuomo cannot stop thinking and talking about how unfair everything is for him. But what about for everyone else? I am actually a government employee in New York State, working in public service in a county in Western New York. And the idea that my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss thinks that sort of response is appropriate—honestly, is even baseline acceptable from one human being responding to other human beings—is horrifying. How is anyone who works in service to this state and therefore knows they may have to come into contact with this creep supposed to feel safe?
Yet Cuomo’s last line of defense in this game, as he clearly sees it, of he said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said with 11 different accusers now, is that he is a kind and understanding person, one moved to put himself out there to support victims. He says that in the same breath that he again perpetuated the false narrative that victims are inherently unreliable because of their trauma, too delicate, too fragile and weak—after all, why else would they have been victimized, right?
That’s the undertone of all of his badgering of these various women about fidelity and divorce and sex and marriage and loneliness and younger women—are you fucked up? Are you fucked up enough that I could fuck with you and no one would believe you? This is why in the report his lawyer sleazily tries to gesture at some vague rumor about Bennett that Cuomo is apparently too benevolent to expose, but certainly slimy and craven enough to tease.
Fuck that. Fuck that and fuck him and fuck anyone who is morally bankrupt enough to go along with his sweeping claims of total innocence in the face of what all of these women are telling us, and investigators have now confirmed. Watching his stupid little video, I was stunned by the manipulation, the cravenness, but most of all the utter predictability. In that video, Cuomo was every powerful prick who ever convinced someone vulnerable that actually, what he did was okay and you’re just confused. You’re just confused, okay, honey? Okay, sweetheart.
This fucking guy. In his little video, he suggested COVID-19 meant there was too much happening in New York to do something about him being powerful and mean and cruel and abusive. And you know what? He’s right. We do have too much going on for his shit. That’s why he needs to go.
And if Carl Heastie and the Assembly and the machine-politics-loving Democrats of New York can’t summon a fraction of the courage of a 25-year-old victim of assault and impeach him, we don’t need them either.
