Miami reporter is the latest woman to accuse Cuomo of sexual harassment
A South Florida woman is the seventh to step forward to accuse New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. Her allegation comes amid a growing call from several high-profile Democrats demanding that Cuomo resign as women have come forward with their stories.
In a frank essay written for New York magazine, “Cuomo never let me forget I was a woman,” Jessica
Bakeman, who is currently a K-12 and higher education reporter for
WLRN, South Florida’s NPR affiliate and a Miami Herald news partner, recounts a series of improprieties she alleges happened between 2012 and 2014.
Bakeman was 25 and working as a statehouse reporter for what is now Politico New York, she says in the article. This gave her close proximity to Cuomo, who has denied touching anyone inappropriately, the Associated Press reported.
“I never meant to make anyone feel any uncomfortable,” Cuomo has said.
But Bakeman, who has previously written for the Star Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Gannett, according to MEAWW News, recounts a different experience in the New York Intelligencer feature. “Andrew Cuomo’s hands had been on my body — on my arms, my shoulders, the small of my back, my waist — often enough by late 2014 that I didn’t want to go to the holiday party he was hosting for the Albany press corps at the executive mansion,” her essay opens.
But it was her job as a reporter to attend, she said. At the event, at the Capitol, she said Cuomo, a Democrat now in his third term as New York governor, took her hand, “as if to shake it,” but would not let go and put his other arm around Bakeman’s back, his other hand on her waist and held her firmly, and indicated to a photographer he wanted a posed photo with her. She wrote: “My job was to analyze and scrutinize him. I didn’t want a photo of him with his hands on my body and a smile on my face. But I made the reflexive assessment that most women and marginalized people know instinctively, the calculation about risk and power and self-preservation. I knew it would be far easier to smile for the brief moment it takes to snap a picture than to challenge one of the most powerful men in the country.”
Bakeman, a summa cum laude graduate from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, alleges that Cuomo said in front of her colleagues, “I’m sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable? I thought we were going steady.”
Bakeman said she was humiliated. “But, of course, that was the point,” she wrote. “I never thought the governor wanted to have sex with me. It wasn’t about sex. It was about power. He wanted me to know that I was powerless, that I was small and weak, that I did not deserve what relative power I had: a platform to hold him accountable for his words and actions.”
The Herald reached out to Bakeman but she declined to be interviewed.
There, on Friday, Bakeman commented on the reaction Friday’s New York Intelligencer article had generated. “The vast majority of messages I have gotten today are from other women telling me that reading my essay was like reading their own diaries,” she posted. “If you don’t recognize sexual harassment in your own life or workplace, it’s well past time to start. And to do something about it,” Bakeman posted.
Alicia Zuckerman, editorial director at WLRN, said of her colleague stepping forward, “I see a lot of women nodding reading this. Honest, *power*ful essay by my colleague.”
Cuomo, 63, has not publicly addressed Bakeman’s allegations. But Friday, “Cuomo generally denied new allegations and urged the public to ‘wait for the facts,’” CNN reported.