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Flannery Amdahl’s memories of working for Andrew Cuomo are a break with the rock star status the New York governor enjoyed last year.
“People were talking all the time about the way he yelled, berated and belittled people,” says Amdahl, 37, who describes the governor’s office as the most toxic and abusive place she has ever worked.
“His staff copied this behavior so I felt like I was treated this way by my supervisor. I think it was rampant and well known: everyone in Albany talks about the nastiness of the bedroom.
As Cuomo goes from hero to zero, these complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. He is accused of covering the number of coronavirus deaths in state retirement homes. Amdahl, a former labor policy adviser, believes he should resign just for that. But it is the other scandal devouring the three-term governor that offers particularly treacherous ground to the national Democrats.
Four women have come forward to accuse Cuomo, 63, of sexual harassment. Charlotte Bennett, 25, a former aide, told CBS that during a one-on-one meeting last June, Cuomo’s questions led her to conclude that “the governor is trying to sleep with me.” .
Another former aide, Ana Lis, 35, made the allegations on Saturday night, telling the Wall Street Journal Cuomo “asked her if she had a boyfriend, called her sweetheart, hit her in the lower back … And once kissed her hand when she got up from her desk ”.
Before Lis showed up, Cuomo apologized for the comments that made one of the women uncomfortable while denying the inappropriate contact. Although an independent investigation is underway, he faces calls to resign from Congressmen Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, and Elise Stefanik, a Republican, as well as representatives of the Democratic state.
But no other National Democrat joined the chorus. The Axios website called it the party’s “moment of hypocrisy”, saying, “Gov. Andrew Cuomo should face explicit calls to step down from President Biden, if you apply the standard Democrats have set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a tight call.
The double standard charge indicates a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with changing public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and gender boundaries.
His hierarchy defended Bill Clinton over his inappropriate relationship with young intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men to account, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who occupies the former seat of Hillary Clinton in New York argued that the former president should have stepped down because of the affair.
That same year, Gillibrand became the first Democratic senator to ask his colleague from Minnesota, Al Franken, to resign over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was joined by others including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not happen anywhere. I think the best thing for Senator Franken to do is to resign.
That’s exactly what Franken did, but some critics now believe he was rushed to trial and should have been allowed to wait for the results of an investigation.
This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged conduct was “totally unacceptable,” she refrained from demanding that he resign before the investigation was completed. This is a position shared by the other senator from New York, majority leader Chuck Schumer, as well as Joe Biden and Harris, now vice president.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday: “The vice president’s point of view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices must be heard. They should tell their story. An independent investigation is underway now, under the supervision of the New York attorney general, and she certainly supports it. “
But it puts Democratic leaders at odds with groups like Women’s March, which arose out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment and was caught on camera filming. brag about grabbing women’s genitals.
Rachel O’Leary Carmona, Executive Director of Women’s March, said: “Any man who puts women at risk in the workplace should quit. This is our general position on workplace harassment.
“We share the view that there should be an independent investigation, but Cuomo himself has not even denied many allegations of harassment and, to us, this is disqualifying behavior. It could be illegal, but it couldn’t be illegal either.
Carmona urged the governor to take responsibility for his actions.
“Cuomo should be the person talking about it, and the responsibility for his personal behavior shouldn’t lie with other people. However, the Democratic Party needs to set the standard here because women have been so poorly served, certainly in the past four years, and of course before.
‘Sensitivities have changed’
Just as Cuomo’s instantaneous deification and then instantaneous demonization left a lot of people clamoring for nuance and complexity, it can be said that two cases of sexual harassment in politics are not quite the same.
Sometimes the allegations date back several decades and go back to the period before the accused took office. In Cuomo’s case, they’re much newer, implying the governor ignored the lessons from #MeToo. Sometimes the allegations were about inappropriate contact or comments. Others involve rape or other forms of violence.
In 2018, Eric Schneiderman, a New York attorney general hailed as a liberal advocate for women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who quickly called on him to step down.
Later that year, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was nearly derailed by claims by Dr Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her at a party when the two were teenagers. Harris, then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was praised by fellow Democrats for grilling the judge during a bitter political fight.
In 2019, several women accused Biden of having unwanted physical contact. For example, Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state assembly, recalled a meeting in 2014 where he touched her shoulders, bent down to smell her hair, and kissed her l back of the head. He posted a video message that promised, “The limits of personal space protection have been reset. I understand.”
The parallels were inescapable this week when Cuomo, who Anna Ruch said put his hands on her cheeks and asked to kiss her at a wedding in 2019, explained that he often greets people with a hug and a kiss, a habit he learned from his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo.
“I understand that sensitivities have changed,” he told reporters. “The behavior has changed. I understand and I will learn from it. “
Last year, Tara Reade, a former Senate employee, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained baseless and vanished from the electoral race. Biden chose a woman – Harris – as his running mate and has often highlighted her work as the main sponsor of the violence against women law.
His fate was very different from that of Franken, once expected to be a presidential candidate.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Looking back, a number of Senate Democrats who urged him to step down later expressed regret. They realized that they were moving too quickly, that they didn’t know enough, and that the punishment didn’t quite match what they later learned to be misbehaving.
Jacobs added: “There is a learning curve and it is both about understanding what happened and not being intimidated by Republicans who refuse to play through the semblance of decency. Do you remember Kavanaugh? They didn’t even want to investigate and instead you had [Senator] Lindsey Graham shouting at the committee.
“I don’t think the Republican Party is in a position to lecture anyone on how to deal with sexual harassment. They seem to have gained real expertise on how to avoid it. “
Cuomo, who was housing secretary under Bill Clinton and who gave Emmy-winning briefings on Covid-19 last year, had long been known to New Yorkers for his old-school, pugilistic style. As he fights for his political life – if he doesn’t resign, running for a fourth term can become untenable – activists hope broader lessons will be learned not only by politicians but by society at large .
Emily May, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Hollaback !, a global anti-harassment movement, said: “As a society we need to keep the conversation from just looking at these high profile people who create harm and really start to watch. how evil is part of the daily water we swim in.
“Just because we’re firing Andrew Cuomo, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein doesn’t mean it doesn’t solve the problem. The biggest problem is still there is that harassment is considered an acceptable part of our culture. That’s why so many of these people in power are doing it. So yes, we have to react and root out the harassment wherever it is, but we also have to keep an eye on the ball. “
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