Indefensible Andrew

The chief executive of New York State government subjected subordinates to unwelcome hugs, kisses and gropes. He asked a younger female employee about her sex life and remarked, “If you were single, the things I would do to you.” He told a state trooper on his protective detail that he was looking for a girlfriend who “can handle pain.” He shuffled his female staff around, seemingly based on the way they looked. And when complaints came to those in his inner circle, they were essentially buried rather than investigated.

So say his accusers, more often than not with corroboration, according to the detailed, 165-page report by the two investigators who Attorney General Tish James deputized, former U.S. Attorney Joon Kim and employment attorney Anne Clark. In the face of these facts, having lost the confidence of his partners in governing, as well as his own commissioners and President Biden, Andrew Cuomo should have the dignity and decency to step down rather than continue to lead an executive branch that requires its own managers and thousands of private-sector employers to obey strict laws prohibiting workplace sexual harassment.

Should, but won’t. Cuomo, insistent on his innocence, refuses for now to resign. That forces New York to ask itself whether, in the third year of a governor’s third term, it wishes to drag itself through an Assembly impeachment proceeding and state Senate trial. As an Editorial Board that scoffed at the impeachment of Bill Clinton, we can’t say we are excited by the prospect.

Citing the total number of Cuomo accusers — 11 — is unhelpful, as it conflates very serious claims with relatively innocuous ones. For example, Kim and Clark spotlight the governor’s offhand rejoinder after a female doctor told Cuomo she would be “gentle but accurate” in administering a COVID test. Cuomo’s reply: “[G]entle but accurate, I’ve heard that before.” Then there’s exhibit 35, the transcript of a phone conversation between Cuomo and one accuser, in which Cuomo sang a snippet of the Contours’ “Do You Love Me.”

Cuomo is allowed to have a personality, and to be friendly with his aides, and to make jokes that don’t land. But in a rehearsed video response and an accompanying rebuttal from his lawyer, the governor insists that’s where the story ends: He has always been handsy in a Bidenesque sort of way, has always embraced people and kissed them on the cheek and forehead, habits learned from his father and mother. Indeed, the published response contains photos of not only Cuomo but Barack Obama and George W. Bush embracing women and men alike. If we bring a man down for this, goes the implication, we effectively criminalize glad-handing and comforting widows at funerals.

That is disingenuous. It does not speak to claims disgusting and damning in their particulars.

Deserving special mention here, partially because Cuomo’s rebuttal doesn’t mention her at all, is the terrible account by a state trooper. Cuomo briefly met her at an event in November 2017. Afterward, he asked for her to be moved to his Protective Services Unit. Despite a requirement that troopers have three years of service prior to joining the PSU — she had two — that’s what happened. Once on his detail, the governor then is said to have engaged in behavior she called “flirtatious” and “creepy.” He rubbed his hand across her stomach while she held a door open for him at an even; ran his finger down her back while saying “hey, you”; and made sexually suggestive comments, including her why she wanted to get married when marriage means “your sex drive goes down.”

Another woman says he hugged her close and slid her hand up her blouse, grabbing her breast, an allegation Cuomo strenuously denies. Then there is the accuser whose allegations set the investigation in motion, Charlotte Bennett. She says Cuomo asked her intimate questions that amounted to sexual advances. He says he knew she was a victim of sexual assault, as was one of his own family members, and was making a good-faith attempt to help her work through her pain as a loved one would.

Even if one accepts the governor’s story of being misunderstood over and over and over and over again, the way words and actions are perceived by others matters. Women have a right not to be made to feel uncomfortable every day they go to work. Here, female employees have been degraded and humiliated repeatedly in the workplace. If Cuomo saw that elsewhere, he would raise his voice, slam the table and call it unacceptable. And he wants us to accept it?