Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has blamed “the cancel culture on steroids” for bringing him down in the wake of sexual harassment allegations.
Cuomo, who appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, alongside Melissa DeRosa, his former chief of staff and author of What’s Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis, also said he felt that President Joe Biden should have been more supportive given he had also been accused of sexual assault in 2020 by former senate staffer Tara Reade.
“What Biden’s calculus was—he was accused by Tara Reade, fingers in the vagina, sorry mom. Other women came out, ‘he smelt my hair’, etcetera. He wanted quickly to distance himself from this, which is ironic because the same attorney who represented the Tara Reade case is the main attorney who drove this case against me. He could have said, ‘You know what, I went through this, let’s take a deep breath and actually get the facts before we ask a governor to resign.’”
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Cuomo avoided criminal prosecution after five district attorneys investigated allegations by 11 women contained in a state report, which included the claim he groped a former aide at the governor’s mansion in 2020.
“Eleven cases trigger the cancel culture. Everyone has to be first before they get accused by a women’s group of not moving fast enough,” Cuomo said. “President of the United States within hours says you have to resign… and then now it’s dominoes among the Democrats.”
“This cancel culture is a loaded gun and they can use it against anyone anytime, even for their own self-interest,” he said.
Cuomo said what he found the most chilling was “the cancel culture on steroids at the highest levels.”
The 65-year-old said he would “probably” be running against Biden now for the Democratic nomination had he not been brought down politically.
“I don’t know that candidate Biden is the strongest candidate we can put up and frankly I doubt it. Secondly, and even more importantly, I think the Democratic party has to engage with real people and real voters on a different level,” he said. “I think they are too much in Washington and too much, ‘Trump is no good and Trump is a bum’. You can’t run on banking that the other guy is going to lose—you have to have an affirmative strategy to win, and the truth is there has been a paralysis of government.”
