The governor digs himself a deeper hole.
The governor digs himself a deeper hole.
T here were times during New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s press conference on Wednesday when you had to wonder whether he was trying to get himself held liable for sexual harassment.
His carefully crafted reputation for being a peerless communicator notwithstanding, Cuomo is prone to error, and worse, in these settings. That is what happens to even smart people who grow accustomed to fawning media coverage. Without the wariness that comes from being challenged and badgered, things that aren’t true trip easily off their tongues, sometime because they’re lying, and other times because they don’t prepare well enough before taking questions. Cuomo is smooth enough that what he says usually sounds plausible in the moment, even if, upon reflection, it’s absurd. He figures, though, that there is no “upon reflection.” Top Democrats come to assume the press is there to clean up their messes, not subject their commentary to journalistic skepticism and follow-up investigation. When you get used to not being called on the nonsense you spout, you spout more nonsense.
That is why Cuomo’s root problem is not sexual harassment. Nor is it cooking the books on nursing-home deaths. It is that the Left has turned on him. The guy who was born into Democratic prominence, married into Kennedy royalty, and was embraced by the Clintons, now has to sink or swim on his own. It’s not his strong suit.
The governor’s apology was duly emotive — he even effected getting choked up. But it hurts him legally. That price might be worth paying if the apology helped him politically. It won’t. Its insincerity was too transparent, its credibility further undermined by remarks that were, by turn, incoherent and laughable.
In Cuomo’s too-clever-by-half manner, he set things up by claiming that he was speaking publicly against the advice of counsel. You’re supposed to forget that this guy has been a lawyer for nearly 40 years. Not only was he the state’s attorney general, he proposed the state’s pathbreaking, #MeToo-driven sexual-harassment law. He usually wants you to think of him as the sharpest New York lawyer since Alexander Hamilton. He is the Emmy-winning Maestro of the Presser who’s got the answers primed before mere mortals have figured out what to ask.
The idea was that the apology, which he next offered, must be sincere because, well, what person in his right mind says he’s sorry when he’s under investigation? When the lawyers are warning him that an apology would be interpreted as an admission of guilt? Cuomo also framed the apology as if it were unqualified: “I apologize, not ‘I apologize, but.’” He insisted, “There is no but.”
But . . . there’s nothing but but. Oh sure, he’s right that he’s not offering a qualified apology. That, however, is because his bottom line is that he hasn’t done anything to be sorry about. He feels sad that young women may have taken him the wrong way. His message, though, is that the issue is not his behavior; it’s their hypersensitivity.
Cuomo is going to have problems with that story.
It’s not just that the story is implausible. He couldn’t stick to it. He’s never done anything to be ashamed of . . . but he is “embarrassed” by his behavior. He didn’t mean to cause anyone pain . . . but it’s obvious to him that he caused pain. He wasn’t aware that his behavior could be construed as sexual harassment . . . but rest assured he did take the sexual-harassment awareness training he requires everyone to take. It was dizzying. The governor is emphatic, alternatively, that he never physically abused anyone, and that he always kisses and hugs everyone.
Got it?
In the resulting cognitive dissonance, he hopes you’ll conclude that Lindsey Boylan must be lying about his forced kiss on her lips when they were alone his office — despite his sending an email message, through his assistant, that she reminded him of an old girlfriend . . . except that he thought Boylan was more attractive; despite what she says was his penchant to be handsy around her back, legs, and arms. You’re supposed to think it makes perfect sense that he kisses everyone except attractive women he has the hots for. But . . . he predicts that there could be more photos coming like the one we were treated to last weekend: Cuomo caressing the face of an attractive and perplexed-looking young woman, Anna Ruch — who says that picture was snapped just after he caressed her bare back . . . upon meeting her for the first time, at a wedding reception.
Umm . . .
It gets worse. See, the governor needn’t have kissed anyone, nor even gotten physical with anyone, in order to be liable for sexual harassment. And for that, he can thank . . . Andrew Cuomo!
Well, not entirely. It has long been the law, in New York and elsewhere, that sexual harassment simply entails the creation of a hostile or offensive work environment. It need not be created by unwanted physical touching. Verbal or visual displays will do. But Cuomo being Cuomo, craving recognition as a super-evolved #MeToo visionary, he forged a reform that makes it easier for victims (or, as progressives put it, “survivors”) to hold harassers liable.
It used to be that a complainant would have to prove that unwanted sexual suggestiveness was “severe or pervasive” before a hostile workplace could be found. But under the bill that Cuomo championed, harassment is actionable if it merely subjects an employee to “inferior terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.” As legal commentators put it, complainants now need only meet the very relaxed standard of demonstrating that the misconduct rose above the level of “petty slights and trivial inconveniences.” And while Cuomo repeatedly maintained at the press conference that he never intended to hurt or intimidate anyone, his state of mind is beside the point. There are no criminal allegations at the moment. For civil liability under sexual-harassment law, what matters is what the complainant reasonably sensed, not what the accused subjectively intended.
Cuomo’s new law relaxing the proof hurdles for sexual-harassment complaints came into force in October 2019. The date is important. Of all the complaints, Lindsey Boylan’s are the most serious. Yet, she says Cuomo’s provocations happened between 2016 and 2018, before the law changed. Boylan would thus have to satisfy the “severe or pervasive” standard, though if her version of events is ultimately found credible, she’ll be able to do that.
Charlotte Bennett, by contrast, gets the benefit of Cuomo’s relaxed proof standard because she alleges that the governor, her top superior on the executive staff, unnerved her with a thinly veiled sexual proposition in June 2020.
On this point, rather than help himself, or at least stop digging, Cuomo made the hole deeper at Wednesday’s presser, in two ways.
First, he conceded that he had made Bennett feel uncomfortable. This is essentially an admission of guilt under Cuomo’s own sexual-harassment standards, especially when we note that the governor’s staff certainly did not treat the matter like it was a “petty slight” or a “trivial inconvenience.” When Bennett reported Cuomo’s behavior to the governor’s chief of staff, the administration immediately went into damage-control mode. Bennett was quickly transferred to another job in a different area of the State Capitol complex (where she wouldn’t have interaction with the governor), and she was interviewed by Cuomo’s special counsel.
Second, the governor battered what is left of his credibility. Remember, after Bennett’s allegations were published last weekend, Cuomo began floating the storyline, which he reiterated at the press conference, that he had no idea that his habitual “joking” and “flirtatious” banter were disturbing to his subordinates. It has only just dawned on him that this has been a problem. Really? Does anyone believe the governor, who is notoriously manic about his reputation, was kept in the dark by his top staff when Bennett complained last year? Does anyone think he didn’t notice when, right after he propositioned a subordinate nearly 40 years his junior, she suddenly disappeared?
Which brings us to Cuomo’s main pitch at Wednesday’s press conference: He’s always expressed himself with colleagues and peers in a familiar, physical manner, but at some point when he wasn’t paying attention, the mores of society suddenly changed — so, hey, cut him some slack.
I guess he figures this worked for President Biden. But it shouldn’t have — and wouldn’t have if the media-Democrat complex hadn’t decided Biden was needed to beat President Trump. Plus, Biden is 15 years older than Cuomo.
I’m about the same age as the governor. Like him, I spent a lot of my professional life in the legal profession. Has society changed? Sure. But the way coworkers are expected to treat each other, particularly in superior-subordinate relationships in the workplace, has not. When he’s not hitting on the help, Cuomo is among the first to lecture the rest of us on that point. It is true that, nowadays, the ambit of offensive behavior that is legally actionable is broader than it was 20 or 40 years ago. But it was always known to be offensive — nowhere more so than in governmental and law offices.
Cuomo says he had no inkling that his obnoxious commentary was disturbing. He’s going to have a hard time with that whopper when some competent cross-examiner methodically reads him his every sexually suggestive comment and asks him, one by one, whether he — the sophisticated governor, the accomplished lawyer, the champion of women in the workplace — is sure he didn’t realize that the remark might have been a teeny bit offensive.
On that, he’s now trapped. At the press conference, he said he now grasps that his subordinates were offended by his behavior, and that he needs to change. Politically, that may give his dwindling loyalists a talking point to run with. Legally, though, it is an acknowledgment that such complainants as Charlotte Bennett had every right to feel offended and intimidated.
Just a few weeks ago, Governor Cuomo had his top aide apologize to state lawmakers for misleading them on nursing-home COVID deaths, the better to conceal the information from the Justice Department. On Wednesday, Cuomo “defended” himself from sexual-harassment allegations by apologizing because he realizes his underlings were reasonably disturbed by his conduct. If the governor keeps talking, there won’t be much work for investigators to do.