A Cuomo Accuser's New Claims of Harassment and Retaliation
By Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker
19 March 21
In her first extensive interview, Lindsey Boylan sheds new light on a toxic
workplace, as insiders detail the campaign to discredit her.
On the morning of December 13, 2020, Lindsey Boylan sat in the passenger
seat of her family's car, with her husband at the wheel and her six-year-old
daughter in the back. She began typing a series of tweets on her phone.
Boylan, a former special adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, had felt
increasingly troubled as press reports mentioned Cuomo as a potential
Attorney General in the Biden Administration. For more than a year, she had
been raising allegations on Twitter that Cuomo presided over a hostile and
toxic workplace, initially drawing little attention. A week before, Boylan
had tweeted again, and another former Cuomo employee had reached out to her
privately, to share a story of being sexually harassed by the Governor. "I
felt really responsible for what happened to this woman, because I didn't do
something about it," Boylan told me, in her first detailed interview about
her allegations. She saw the stories about Cuomo's political prospects as a
cause for urgency.
In the car, she began tweeting allegations that Cuomo had sexually harassed
her, too. "@NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and
watched," she wrote. She referenced harassment about her looks and described
an unpredictable and intimidating workplace experience. Her husband became
aware of the tweets only as the reaction began to build online. "I felt like
I was just exploded," Boylan recalled. "And he felt like he was having a
heart attack."
As Boylan's disclosures began to draw notice on social media, a group of
current and former Cuomo staffers who served as his informal
crisis-communications brain trust moved to squash them "in real time,"
according to one person with direct knowledge of the effort. Members of that
group included Melissa DeRosa, a senior aide; Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo's
spokesperson; and Steven M. Cohen, a former secretary to the Governor. They
circulated Boylan's tweets and held a series of urgent calls. The group had
just emerged from a frantic effort to respond to allegations that Cuomo's
office had deliberately undercounted COVID-related deaths in New York
nursing homes. They were "putting that to bed, and then she pipes up. And
then it's sort of a big scramble," the person with direct knowledge of the
effort told me. "It was, like, what the hell do we do about this?" Cuomo's
advisers arrived at a plan to leak Boylan's personnel records, which
included allegations that Boylan had bullied colleagues, some of them women
of color. "The decision was made collectively," the person with direct
knowledge of the effort said. "That these are facts, the reporters should
see them."
An intermediary who says that he was not on the calls, Rich Bamberger, a
former communications director for Cuomo who now works for the
public-relations firm Kivvit, called several reporters and advised them to
contact the Governor's office. According to the person with knowledge of the
conversations, Azzopardi then sent Boylan's personnel files to reporters. By
day's end, several of the complaints about Boylan had appeared in stories,
by the Associated Press, the New York Post, and the Albany-based Times
Union. Boylan recalled being stunned by the articles. "I couldn't move. I
couldn't breathe," she said. In the ensuing days, Cuomo aides began
contacting people who had worked under Boylan-which some of the recipients
found intimidating, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Cuomo
advisers also considered releasing a letter attacking Boylan's credibility
and reputation, drafts of which were first reported by the Times this week.
They ultimately decided against releasing the letter. "My life was, you
know, for a period, destroyed," Boylan told me. In a statement, Beth Garvey,
Cuomo's acting counsel, said, "With certain limited exceptions, as a general
matter, it is within a government entity's discretion to share redacted
employment records, including in instances when members of the media ask for
such public information and when it is for the purpose of correcting
inaccurate or misleading statements."
Boylan's allegations largely faded from public view, until last month, when
she posted a detailed account of her experience on Medium. Boylan told me,
during a series of lengthy interviews, that she decided to disclose her
allegations via online posts and initially declined interview requests from
journalists because "having someone dissect my trauma is not something I
wanted." She said that the essay took her more than a month to write. "I
realized I had to own this experience," she told me. "It was something I was
going to have to talk about eventually." A series of disclosures about Cuomo
from other women, including multiple allegations of harassment and one of
groping, quickly followed Boylan's. "Seeing Lindsey's story was a huge
factor in my decision to come forward," Charlotte Bennett, a former Cuomo
staffer who began publicly discussing her account of sexual harassment by
the Governor after Boylan's Medium post, told me. "Coming forward didn't
feel like a choice-it felt like my responsibility to validate Lindsey's
story and signal to others that it was O.K. to come forward."
The revelations have left Cuomo's political future in New York, which he has
governed since 2011, in a free fall. He now faces probes by both the New
York attorney general, Letitia James, and the state assembly, which this
week retained a law firm for that purpose. Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent Democrats in the state congressional
delegation have called for the Governor to resign. This week, President
Biden, a longtime ally of Cuomo's, said that the Governor should step down
if the allegations are confirmed by investigators. Cuomo acknowledged some
of the harassment allegations, saying, "I now understand that I acted in a
way that made people feel uncomfortable," but he maintained that his
behavior was unintentional and denied all allegations that he "touched
anyone inappropriately." A spokesperson added, "As we said before, Ms.
Boylan's claims of inappropriate behavior are quite simply false."
Until December 13th, Cuomo's grip on power in New York had been
near-absolute, a dominance secured at times through his willingness to
discredit and intimidate his adversaries. Then Boylan posted her tweets. At
first, it seemed as if she would meet the same fate as so many others who
had challenged the Governor. Now, the Cuomo team's response may turn out to
be one of its final efforts to frighten an opponent into submission.
Between 2015 and 2018, Boylan served in several government roles, including
deputy secretary for economic development. In 2016, she began interacting
with Cuomo directly and had her first encounters with a workplace culture
under him that she said was rife with bullying and retribution. "It was
toxic, and particularly for women," she said. Her description matched those
of multiple current and former Cuomo staffers I spoke with, though others
told me that the office culture was intense but not inappropriate. Boylan's
leaked personnel files reportedly contain allegations that she bullied women
who worked with her, including Black women. Several former colleagues of
Boylan's, none of whom are Black, told me that they found the claims
plausible and said that they had also found Boylan herself to be a hostile
presence in the workplace. "I've seen Lindsey do her job well, but I've also
had experiences where I felt belittled or bullied by her," a former
colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me. Others disputed
that account or said that Boylan's conduct was consistent with a culture
where volatility was the norm. "It was a hard place to be," Joel Wertheimer,
an attorney who served as Cuomo's staff secretary, told me. "They were nasty
and awful." Wertheimer quit after just seven months, dispirited by the
environment. He is now a campaign consultant to Boylan, who is running for
Manhattan borough president. He added, "I also was not the best version of
myself when I was working there."
Boylan said that Cuomo set the tone, ridiculing several of his closest
staffers, including Stephanie Benton, the director of the Governor's
offices. "I remember, Stephanie had a haircut that he kept making fun of her
for all day in front of other people. And she was crying," Boylan said.
(Benton, who is still employed in state government, said that Boylan's
account was untrue and that the Governor had always treated her well,
adding, "If I felt otherwise, I would speak for myself.") Boylan also said
that Cuomo repeatedly ranted about another staffer, a young male aide, being
"fat." The young male aide, who no longer works for Cuomo, declined to
comment on his experience and asked not to be named. Boylan described the
workplace culture under the Governor as aggressive and combative. At a party
in the pool house at the Governor's mansion, in Albany, Boylan recalled
seeing a dartboard bearing a photo of Bill de Blasio, Cuomo's antagonist
since he was elected Mayor of New York City, in 2014. "I couldn't believe
how brazen that was," she said. (A spokesperson for the Governor declined to
comment on the dartboard.)
Boylan had her first interaction with Cuomo after a speech he gave at
Madison Square Garden on January 6, 2016, when she was working as the chief
of staff at Empire State Development, a state entity that promotes economic
growth. She said that he seemed to pay an unusual amount of attention to
her. Soon afterward, she said, her boss, Howard Zemsky, told her that Cuomo
had a "crush" on her. (Zemsky did not respond to a request for comment.)
During the next two years, Boylan said, the Governor repeatedly commented on
her appearance and touched her more than she felt was necessary or
professional. "He would put his hand on my lower back," Boylan said, adding
that her experiences mirrored those of another woman, Anna Ruch, who told
the Times that the Governor touched her lower back and asked to kiss her at
a wedding reception. "He would find a way to, like, touch me in
passing-getting on the plane, getting off the plane," Boylan said. "He
frequently stared at my legs."
Kelsey DePalo, who met Boylan when both attended Wellesley College, told me
that Boylan was initially excited to work with Cuomo, but her attitude soon
changed. "She would talk about how he was creepy," DePalo recalled. "We
would talk about, you know, how when, if someone opens a door for you, they
can open a door, or they can open a door and put their hand on the small of
your back. They can lean over to tell you something, or lean over to tell
you something and also put their hand on your knee." She added, "You can
sometimes catch someone, like, looking at your outfit in a way that makes
you feel uncomfortable. Or commenting on your appearance. And so she would
describe how he gave her the creeps, and was very touchy-feely in ways that
made her feel highly uncomfortable."
Another friend, as well as Boylan's mother and husband, told me that Boylan
had discussed similar concerns with them in 2016 and 2017. Boylan's mother,
Karen Boylan, saw the behavior as a pattern. "I hoped she would stay away
from him," she told me. Karen told me that, years earlier, she had quit a
job as an accountant at a law firm after her boss sexually harassed her.
Boylan was in high school at the time, and told me that her mother's
experience, which she referred to in her first tweets about her harassment
allegations, deeply affected her. Boylan's mother said that she had
described the harassment to her daughter to prepare her for what she might
face in the workplace. "It was something that we talked about a lot while
she was growing up," Karen told me. "You know, you hope your children learn
from this."
In an e-mail sent on August 4, 2016, Karen wrote, to her daughter, "I was
thinking after our conversation last night about Governor Cuomo. I would
hate (couldn't tolerate) living with a partner or husband who behaved like
that with women. It sounds very inappropriate what he says to you too."
Three months later, Boylan forwarded her mother an e-mail in which a Cuomo
staffer asked Boylan's supervisor whether she would be at an event the
Governor was attending. "It's gross," Boylan told her mother, in a text that
day. "I just wish I could be told how great I am based on my intelligence
and abilities rather than some dumb thing." (A spokesperson for Cuomo said
that the staffer who sent the e-mail "oversaw events and scheduling, so it
was her job to understand what relevant senior members of the team-male and
female-would be attending Governor events.")
Boylan said that the Governor frequently sought her out, sometimes taking
her away from substantive responsibilities to fulfill a role she felt was
ornamental. The Regional Economic Development Council awards, in Albany, in
December, 2016, were the culmination of a year's work for Boylan. The
monetary awards to local businesses and organizations are a part of Cuomo's
economic strategy and were a centerpiece of Boylan's portfolio. After the
awards, a Cuomo aide aggressively pressed Boylan to return to New York City
on a helicopter with Cuomo and Maria Bartiromo, a television host, who had
spoken at the event. Boylan refused. "He likes to put women next to each
other," Boylan said. "Like we're part of his tools, or his little, you know,
dolls." (A spokesperson for Cuomo said that the flight arrangements were
"not a point of contention.") A few days later, Benton, the Cuomo aide,
e-mailed Boylan, telling her that the Governor had suggested Boylan look up
a woman that colleagues had told her was romantically linked to the
Governor. "You could be sisters," Benton wrote. "Except you're the better
looking sister." (Benton told me, "That was my attempt at banter, not his.")
At a holiday party held at an Albany convention center later that month,
Boylan said, when the Governor approached her, she left the room. Later that
day, she said, the young male aide, who Boylan said had been bullied, called
and told her that the Governor wanted her to come to the Capitol. (The aide
declined to comment on the call.) As Boylan walked to Cuomo's office in the
Capitol, she called her husband and told him that she was afraid. In a
statement, her husband said that he could "sense absolute terror in her
voice." Cuomo showed her his office, and called attention to a cigar box
that he told her was a gift from President Bill Clinton. Since childhood,
Boylan had idolized Hillary Clinton. She once waited in line for hours to
have a photo taken with her, an experience that she said "changed my life."
Boylan said that the obvious reference to Clinton's sexual behavior
disturbed her, because the Governor knew that she considered Hillary Clinton
a role model. "It was deeply distressing," Boylan told me.
