Based on new reporting from New Yorker magazine, a Governor Cuomo would meet beautiful young women at parties and then tell his staffers to go hire them
NEW: Cuomo told aides to track down attractive young women he met at parties and offer them jobs, @rtraister reports https://t.co/dwa8Ova2Mo pic.twitter.com/7CYUlhs0wP
— Justin Miller (@justinjm1) March 12, 2021
Yikes. This has all the markings of not just a pervy governor, but a predator or sorts! And given the latest accusation of him sexually assaulting a female staffer in his home, this probably happened a lot more than we know.
Here’s more from New Yorker magazine:
In 2016, Kaitlin, who asked that her last name not be published, was working 9-to-5 for a Democratic congressman and waiting tables nights and weekends in order to make rent and pay down student loans. In the fall, she was offered a job at a lobbying firm that paid her enough to cut back on waitressing to just weekends.
Six weeks after starting her new job, Kaitlin was working at a fund-raiser that her firm was hosting for Cuomo. As the governor left, he stopped to greet staffers of the event; when he approached Kaitlin, she introduced herself and told him that she used to work for a politician. To her surprise and confusion, he replied that she would soon be back in government, this time at the state level. “Then he grabbed me in a kind of dance pose,” she said, while a photographer snapped a picture. “I was thinking, This is the weirdest interaction I’ve ever had in my life … I was like, Don’t touch me. Everybody was watching.” Kaitlin recalled feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed in front of her new colleagues — “my whole team of people I’d just met” — who gathered around her after Cuomo walked away, joking “Oh, the governor likes you.”
That same week, Kaitlin received a voice-mail from Cuomo’s office asking her to interview for a job. She had not provided his representatives with contact information; they had found her on their own. She disclosed this to her new bosses, who understood her discomfort but explained that he was the governor and that she would have to take the meeting. When Kaitlin turned to several of her former supervisors and mentors for advice, they repeated the same, explaining that, professionally, she had no choice but to go to the interview and take the job he offered her.
“We all knew that this was only because of what I looked like,” said Kaitlin. “Why else would you ask someone to come in two days after you had a two-minute interaction at a party?”
Once she started, Kaitlin said, there wasn’t much direction about what she was supposed to do, except to “be a sponge,” learn from senior women in the office, and react to the governor’s capricious moods….
Not long after she started, she said, Cuomo’s people rented out Dorrian’s for a Super Bowl party. At the end of the night, after the bar opened to the public, Cuomo was sitting in the back room talking to a young woman with a dove tattooed on her hand. At a staff meeting the next morning, Kaitlin said, Cuomo asked his aides to find the woman with the dove tattoo and to consider offering her a job. Kaitlin described the uncanny realization that this was likely how it had gone the morning after she’d met him.
After every public event, Kaitlin sorted through photographs of Cuomo posing with guests, selecting images to which he would append personal notes. She said he always paid special attention to pictures of himself with pretty women. If he didn’t like how he looked in them, he would yell at Kaitlin. “I got screamed at for a lot of bad photos,” she told me.
That’s just one small portion of a very long article unpacking the abusive workplace that was the governor’s office. As they point out in the section about Kaitlin, “The governor never touched Kaitlin inappropriately or made any explicit sexual overtures, she said, but his reactions would sometimes make her feel self-conscious…”
Amidst all of this, a seventh accuser has come forward against Cuomo and Democrats in the US Congress, including AOC and Nadler, have started calling for Cuomo to resign.
Cuomo is holding a press conference right now and it’s believes he’s going to address the latest allegations. He’s pretty bullheaded about not resigning, but we’ll let you know if any big news comes out of this presser.
