Andrew Cuomo ‘kissed me, hugged me, groped me’

The woman who filed a criminal complaint against Andrew Cuomo speaks publicly for the first time, saying he needs ‘to be held accountable’.

The woman who filed a criminal complaint against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last week has spoken publicly for the first time, saying he needed “to be held accountable”.

This comes as a senior aide to the New York Governor resigned on Sunday in the wake of a state attorney general’s report that the governor sexually harassed 11 women.

Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, was linked in the report to efforts to cover up the governor’s actions and retaliate against one of his accusers. Her name was mentioned 187 times in the 168-page report that was released on Tuesday.

“Personally, the past 2 years have been emotionally and mentally trying. I am forever grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such talented colleagues on behalf of our state,” DeRosa said in a statement.

Now ex Secretary to Andrew Cuomo, Melissa DeRosa has been accused of helping to cover up accusations of sexual harassment.

Brittany Commisso, who is one of the 11 accusers, identified herself publicly in an interview with CBS which is set to be broadcast in full on Monday morning (Monday evening AEST). Her claims against the governor first emerged in the spring when she was referred to as an anonymous assistant working in his executive office, who said Cuomo had reached under her shirt and groped her breast.

In a report published by the state’s attorney general last week she is referred to only as “Executive Assistant #1” though the report describes her allegations in great detail, setting them out first before the claims of ten other accusers.

“I believe that my story appears first due to the nature of the inappropriate conduct that the governor did to me,” she said in an interview with the Times Union newspaper and the television station CBS. “He groped me, he touched me, not only once, but twice. And I don’t think that that had happened to any of the other women.”

According to the report, Commisso, who is in her early thirties, began working for the governor in his executive mansion at the end of 2019. On New Year’s Eve of that year he asked her to take a selfie with him and while she was taking it “the Governor moved his hand to grab her butt cheek and began to rub it,” she said. She said that throughout 2020 Cuomo began demanding ever “closer and tighter” hugs with her before she left for the day. She said he would sometimes kiss her.

She said that on November 16, 2020, she was called to the governor’s mansion. Entering his office he hugged her tightly, she said. She said she pulled away and told him: “You’re going to get us into trouble,” to which he responded “I don’t care” and slammed the door of his office shut.

She said he then slid his hand up her blouse. “He cupped my breast,” she told investigators. “I was in such shock …. I just remember looking down seeing his hand, seeing the top of my bra.”

Speaking publicly of the encounters in an interview to be aired on Monday morning, she said that “I believe that … what had happened to me … was the most inappropriate of the actions that he had done.”

She said her encounters with the governor began with “hugs with kisses on the cheek.”

“Then there was at one point a hug, and then when he went to go kiss me on the cheek, he’d quickly turned his head and he kissed me on the lips,” she said.

She said she did not think anyone would believe her at the time. “People don’t understand that this is the governor of the state of New York,” she said. “There are troopers that are outside of the mansion and there are some mansion staff. Those troopers that are there, they are not there to protect me. They are there to protect him,” she said. “I felt as though if I did something to insult him, especially insult him in his own home, it wasn’t going to be him that was going to get fired or in trouble. It was going to be me. And I felt as though if I said something that I know, who was going to believe me?”

Governor Cuomo, 63, has denied her allegations, though he has acknowledged hugging and kissing people generally, claiming that this was part of his culture both as a politician and as an Italian-American man of a certain age. According to the attorney general’s report, he told investigators that the assistant was “the initiator of hugs” and he was “more in the reciprocal business” and did not want “to make anyone feel awkward”.

The investigators said they found Commisso’s allegations to be credible. After the report was published, Cuomo’s lawyer Rita Glavin accused the investigators of failing to properly examine “documentary evidence that refutes (the assistant’s) allegation”. She said emails and logs from the day in question contradicted parts of her story. She said Cuomo could only recall one interaction with her in his office that day without others present. He said the assistant had told him “she was divorcing her husband and needed a different work schedule,” Glavin wrote. She said the governor had sought to counsel her, from his own experience of a divorce. His recollection of the meeting “bears no resemblance at all to her allegations,” she wrote.

On Saturday Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple told reporters that her complaint could lead to at least one misdemeanour charge. “I think we’ve all read the attorney general’s report, we know what’s in it,” he said. “At this point I’m very comfortable and safe saying that she is in fact a victim.”

The Times