Cuomo faces more claims

Current aide accuses the governor of sexual harassment at Capitol

An aide currently working for the governor accuses him of sexual harassment at the Capitol, following a series of unsettling interactions.

He called her and her coworker “mingle mamas.” He inquired about her lack of a wedding ring, she said, and the status of her divorce. She recalled him telling her she was beautiful — in Italian — and, as she sat alone with him in his office awaiting dictation, he gazed down her shirt and commented on a necklace hanging there.

In the latest allegation against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Alyssa Mcgrath, an employee of the governor’s office, described a series of unsettling interactions with the governor, telling The New York Times that Cuomo would ogle her body, remark on her looks, and make suggestive comments to her and another executive aide.

Mcgrath, 33, is the first current aide in Cuomo’s office to speak publicly about allegations of harassment inside the Capitol. Her account of casual sexual innuendo echoes other stories that have emerged in recent weeks about a demeaning office culture, particularly for young women who worked closely with the governor.

The most serious accusation against the governor was made by another current aide who has accused Cuomo of groping her breast in the Executive Mansion. Mcgrath said that the aide described the encounter in detail to her after it was made public in a report in The Times Union of Albany last week.

“She froze when he started doing that stuff to her,” Mcgrath said, adding, “But who are you going to tell?”

She added that the co-worker, who has not been publicly identified, told her that the governor had asked her not to talk about the alleged incident, knowing that the two women regularly spoke and texted about their interactions with Cuomo.

“He told her specifically not to tell me,” Mcgrath said.

In several interviews over the past week, Mcgrath described a pattern of the governor mixing flirtatious banter with more personal comments, as well as a subtle and persistent cultivation of competitive relationships between female co-workers. It was something she said was compounded and protected by a demand for secrecy, and normalized inside the governor’s inner circle.

Mcgrath said that she believed that his actions amounted to sexual harassment.