Covid hero, now pariah: the fall of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
The man the US relied on for guidance in the pandemic now faces claims he sexually harassed six women.
This time last year millions of Americans became acquainted with Andrew Cuomo. New Yorkers already knew him as the state’s governor, but even they began to see him in a new light. They had him down, mostly, as a Machiavellian figure who worked on grudges like Rodin did with clay. You were never quite sure if he was finished.
He talked of himself as a regular guy from Queens and you could imagine him, of a Sunday, in a sleeveless T-shirt, sliding beneath a Corvette, although it was hard to think of him doing anything in his spare time except scheming. He drove liberals crazy.
Then all of a sudden people began calling themselves “Cuomosexuals”. As New York became the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, his calmness and great authority at the daily briefings he held shifted popular opinion — the veteran Democrat was even awarded an Emmy for his “masterful use of television”. Some people thought they could see the outline of nipple rings beneath his tight white polo shirt.
NY hates Cuomo once more
Now New York hates Cuomo once more. Six women have come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment or impropriety, describing a governor who suggested a game of strip poker or told them he was perfectly open to dating women in their twenties. One allegation describes him reaching beneath a young woman’s shirt.
He has denied doing anything of the sort and an independent investigation is under way, while another is looking into his administration’s handling of nursing homes.
Efforts by Cuomo and his aides to tamp down both controversies have led to further allegations of bullying. Dozens of New York politicians are calling for his resignation. He could be impeached. The rise and fall of Cuomo has become the most compelling story in American politics.
Although he grew up the grandson of Italian immigrants, in a middle-class neighbourhood of Queens, Cuomo was also something of a political princeling. He is the second of the five children of Matilda and Mario Cuomo, a three-term governor of New York and a luminous orator whose speech at the Democratic party convention in 1984 propelled him into contention as a possible presidential candidate. On the day of the deadline to get his name on the 1991 primary ballot in New Hampshire, Mario kept two planes idling at the airport while he agonised over the decision before deciding not to run after all. For this he got the title “Hamlet on the Hudson”, and as the younger Cuomo rose in politics he was said to be driven by a desire to avoid the old man’s mistake.
‘He hated a timid opponent’
Andrew Cuomo went to university in New York and then to law school in Albany, the state capital, paying his way by working weekends as a roadside assistance mechanic. His father was the state’s lieutenant governor at the time and they shared a flat in a crumbling hotel, subsisting partly on frozen dinners sent by Matilda. Andrew kept a feisty green parrot, which he trained to dive bomb visitors. Father and son played intensely competitive games of basketball in a gym at the headquarters of the state police.
“He hated few things as much as a timid opponent on the basketball court because you cheated him of a real contest,” Cuomo said at his father’s funeral in 2015. They asked state troopers to serve as referees, “but they were afraid of angering my father”. They also “wanted to be able to wear a gun after one was attacked, by my father or myself, I can’t recall which now, for making a bad call”.
Cuomo had worked on his father’s campaign for mayor in 1977 at the age of 19, and in 1982 managed his father’s successful campaign for governor. “I’ve become very popular lately,” he told The New YorkTimes, his feet up on the desk, smoking a cigarette and basking in his profile as head of the transition team. “He has nothing in his refrigerator,” the article said. “The love of his life is a 1975 blue Corvette he keeps in a garage under a blanket.”
When he started dating Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, she was apparently amused to see that he kept the plastic covers on his furniture. She is also said to have been taken aback by how her fiance planned their wedding like a political campaign.
The union, which produced three daughters, was quickly called “Cuomolot”. She was a human rights advocate while he became President Clinton’s housing secretary. Yet Cuomo seemed to have a testy relationship with his new in-laws. In the Cuomo biography The Contender, Michael Shnayerson says Cuomo loathed the Kennedy get-togethers at the Hyannis Port compound in Massachusetts and “looked disgusted” when everyone started singing. He was also said to have belittled his wife’s dress sense and her domestic skills.
She asked for a divorce in 2002, according to Shnayerson, just after Cuomo had crashed out of that year’s gubernatorial race, his reputation in tatters.
By 2006 he was back in the game, as attorney general of New York. In 2010 he won the governorship. In the decade that followed he presided over the legalisation of gay marriage, an increase in the minimum wage and gun control measures, working through a shifting set of political alliances while indulging in a nearly constant feud with Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York.
He adored big infrastructure projects and named a new bridge over the Hudson after his father. He also presided over the opening of a subway line in Manhattan. However, Andy Byford, the hugely popular Briton that Cuomo hired to fix the subway, seemed to become too popular in Cuomo’s eyes and eventually quit, saying the governor had undermined him.
Occasionally Cuomo behaved like an emperor. The Wall Street Journal reported that when Cuomo toured New York to promote his budget one year, his aides drafted speeches for local officials to give in his praise. There was also the strange piece of art he had erected in 2020, showing a ship sailing through the “Sea of Division”, its sails bearing the words “leadership” and “accomplishment”. On the horizon was a palisade called the “Steps to Progress” and in the sky above it, like the sun, smiled the face of Cuomo. The governor said he had sketched it.
According to a poll at the time, fewer than half of voters thought of him favourably, but by late last April his approval rating had leapt to 77 per cent and he was being recognised nationwide for his daily briefings. President Trump’s freestyling at his own briefings was not going well, and Joe Biden was stuck in his basement in Delaware, not getting much attention. Cuomo filled the void.
‘My mother is not expendable’
“He’s inclined toward tyranny,” a Democratic legislator told The New Yorker “but in a crisis that’s what people want.” While Cuomo talked of infections and hospital admissions, he also spoke of family. “My mother is not expendable,” he declared in response to a Texas politician who had suggested that the elderly ought to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the economy.
He talked about his grown-up daughters who had moved back in with him at the governor’s mansion. “Mariah brought her boyfriend,” he said. “The boyfriend is very nice, and we like the boyfriend. Advice to fathers: the answer on what you think of the boyfriend is always ‘I like the boyfriend.’ Always.”
After his younger brother Chris, a presenter on CNN, caught Covid and isolated himself in his basement in the Hamptons, Cuomo staged video-conference calls with him during his briefings, ostensibly to show New Yorkers someone living with the virus. “I had hallucinations I was seeing Pop,” Chris said. “You came to me in a very interesting ballet outfit and you were dancing in the dream, and you were waving a wand and saying, ‘I wish I could wave my wand and make this go away.’ ”
“I thank you for sharing that with us,” Cuomo replied. “Obviously the fever has affected your mental capacity.” It was odd, this intermingling of politics and family, although it was ever thus in the Cuomo household.
Nursing home cloud
The only big cloud on the horizon involved the toll wrought by the virus in nursing homes. In March last year when New York was scrambling to secure enough hospital beds, Cuomo’s administration issued a directive ordering homes to accept infected residents. They were following federal guidance, Cuomo said. In July the state’s department of health issued a report effectively exonerating Cuomo’s administration, saying that a high turnover of staff had probably caused the devastating spread of the virus through the homes.
Yet it has since been reported that aides to Cuomo prevailed on the officials drafting the report to remove a figure for nursing home deaths of nearly 10,000 in favour of a much lower number, 6432, which excluded residents who died in hospital. The health department explained that the larger number was deleted because it was “not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data”.
The July report allowed Cuomo to complete a victory lap with more peculiar art. One mixed-media poster featured a mountain that nurses, doctors and civilians were scaling using a rope called the “power of we”. In the middle of the mountain sat Cuomo behind his daily briefing desk, flanked by his top people. He declared that he would write a book on leadership. It seemed a little premature.
Sexual harassment scandal
The sexual harassment scandal was triggered in part by the sight of Cuomo apparently attempting to bully a critic into submission. An assemblyman named Ron Kim who spoke out about the nursing homes controversy claims he received a call in which Cuomo promised to “destroy” him. When Kim did not back down and Cuomo began accusing him of past misdeeds, a former aide named Lindsey Boylan published an essay on the publishing platform Medium alleging the “intimidation and abuse [Kim] has faced from Governor Cuomo and his aides” was familiar to many others who “are too afraid to speak up”.
She claimed that the governor had sexually harassed her. Once, after delivering a briefing to Cuomo on infrastructure, he had given her a kiss. Anna Ruch, 33, who did not work in his administration, alleged that the governor had kissed her too, unexpectedly and without her consent, after she met him at a wedding. There was a photograph that seemed to prove it. A former aide named Charlotte Bennett, 25, who said that Cuomo effectively propositioned her, said that his sky-high profile from the pandemic had made him feel “untouchable in a lot of ways”. She told CBS: “He is looking for a girlfriend. He’s lonely. He’s tired.”
At the beginning of this month, on the anniversary of the first confirmed case of coronavirus in New York, the great communicator was silent. Days later he appeared before the cameras. “I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I never ever meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone or cause anyone pain.” He said he often kissed people and began reeling off examples of people he had kissed recently: a pastor, several politicians, men, women, children. “It is my usual and customary greeting,” he said, adding: “I never touched anyone inappropriately.”
Two more women came forward: a former press aide to Cuomo when he was housing secretary in the Clinton administration, Karen Hinton, 62, claimed that he drew her into a “very long” and “too intimate hug” in 2000 (Cuomo denied this), and Ana Liss, 35, who worked for him from 2013 to 2015, alleged he had called her “sweetheart”, and once kissed her hand and asked if she was dating. A spokesman reiterated that Cuomo often kissed people at political receptions.
Then a claim emerged, attributed to an unidentified aide, that Cuomo had groped her. “I have never done anything like this,” Cuomo said on Wednesday night. Yet the next day the police said that they were prepared to investigate, a majority of state legislators called for his resignation and legislators in his party launched an impeachment investigation. Right now Cuomo’s ship is on the rocks. Can the great survivor survive much longer? No one knows.
The Times
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