THE ABUSING SCHNEIDERMAN
More women come forward Faces criminal investigation
A d ay after Eric Schneiderman resigned as state attorney general, Gov. Cuomo o rd e re d that he be investigated — and, “if warranted,” prosecuted.
A woman claims she once went on a blind date from hell with Eric Schneiderman during which he guzzled booze, made a crude come-on and drunkenly drove her home boasting, “I rule this neighborhood.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only as Jennifer C. “When I would tell female friends, they would recoil because it was just so gross.”
Jennifer described the date as starting off picture-perfect: He brought flowers and picked her up in his luxury car for dinner at the cozy New Leaf restaurant in Fort Tryon Park.
But as soon as they got to the eatery, she said, he started hit- ting the bottle — big-time.
“We started with champagne. Then I would say probably two bottles of wine. And then I really distinctly remember him after dinner ordering hard liquor, Scotch or whiskey,” the woman recalled.
“I remember thinking, ‘ Wow, this is a lot of drinking, and I have to get in a car with him,’ ” she added.
Still, Jennifer — who was fixed up on the 2010 date by her friend’s banker husband — said she found Schneiderman “perfectly nice and funny and charming” during the meal.
“I was attracted to him,’’ she admitted.
After dinner, Jennifer said, she let him drive her because she felt she didn’t really have a choice: It was late, they were in the middle of the park in upper Manhattan, and there was no Uber in those days.
Once on the road, however, she couldn’t help but “comment on how much he had to drink.
“He basically said, ‘I’m a state senator and I rule this neighborhood,’ ” she recalled.
Jennifer, a Manhattan newspaper editor who was 39 at the time, said that as the pair continued traveling, she got a text from an old high-school friend inviting her to a party nearby.
She asked Schneiderman to go with her, and he agreed. But as she messaged back and forth with her male friend to get better directions, Schneiderman “started to get really strange.”
“Suddenly, he changed and started to get really jealous and asked me who this guy was,’’ Jennifer recalled.
“Mind you, this was our first
date. I thought this was really odd behavior.
“Then at a red light, he leans over and kisses me. But it was a really aggressive tongue-downyour-throat kind of kiss. And I pulled away, and he asked if there was a problem.
“And I said, ‘Actually, I just like a little bit of tongue.’ ”
Schneiderman shot back, “‘ Oh, do you just like a little bit of d--k, too?’ ” the woman said.
“We had been talking about his daughter at dinner, who must have been really young then. I couldn’t believe someone with a daughter would say that.
“I said, ‘Pull over, I’m getting out of the car.’ And he kept driving in the direction of the party. And I asked him at least three or four times before he finally let me out of the car.
“I remember walking to the party shaking,” she said. “I’ve had creepy dates before, but it was that he changed so fast. It was a very disturbing encounter.
“The drinking and the aggressive behavior . . . Getting a text from another man set him off ? Clearly, the control issues that he has, the drinking, the jealousy, have been going on for quite a while,” Jennifer said.
They never went on another date, and every time she would see his name in the news after that, “I didn’t want to read the rest of the story,” Jennifer said.
When she heard about the abuse allegations against Schneiderman published Monday by The New Yorker magazine, “I wasn’t surprised.”
Still, Jennifer said, up until then, “I just thought he was a repulsive human being who was used to talking to women like that and they put up with it.”
Schneiderman announced his resignation just hours after the magazine piece came out, after Gov. Cuomo and other elected officials called for him to step down.
And one former Working Families Party staffer couldn’t have been happier. The woman confided to a friend that Schneiderman, the progressive party’s fairhaired boy, groped her on an elevator — putting his hand under her skirt — in 2000, shortly after he was first elected to the state Senate, the pal told The Post.
When the staffer heard of Schneiderman’s resignation, she said, “There’s justice in the world!”
Rumors about Schneiderman behaving inappropriately had been swirling for a while, sources told The Post.
Democratic consultant Alexis Grenell told NY1 that she’d heard “specific” information before.
And a former Schneiderman staffer said he wasn’t exactly surprised at the additional allegations of his boss’s heavy boozing. The source said Schneiderman would sometimes “roll into the office at 11 a.m. with bloodshot eyes. He’d come in late.
“He would say he had insomnia and couldn’t sleep,” the ex-staffer added.
But a second ex-staffer was floored by the physical-abuse allegations against his former boss. Schneiderman himself has denied doing anything that was not consensual.
“I never would have imagined that in a million years,” the former employee said. “What’s strange about this is he’s not an intimidating guy.”
Ronan Farrow, who helped rip the lid off Schneiderman’s alleged abuse toward woman with The New Yorker article, blasted the AG’s explanation that he was only “role-playing” when he allegedly slapped and choked former girlfriends.
“I just want to relate the message of one of these women — and it was a shared sentiment among this group — that this was not role-playing, that this was not ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ It wasn’t in a gray area at all,” he said.
“This was activity that happened, in many cases, fully clothed, outside of a sexual context, during arguments.
“In one case, a woman wasn’t even in a relationship at all with him,” Farrow added.
Only in New York would a district attorney open a probe into #MeToo allegations against the man investigating his own office for mishandling a #MeToo claim against one of his wealthy donors.
Gov. Cuomo has already pushed back, saying Tuesday, “It’s very important the DAs who do the investigations do not have the whiff or perception of conflict.”
He plainly means Manhattan DA Cy Vance, who’s already announced he’s on the Eric Schneiderman case.
Yet Schneiderman’s now-former office is, as Cuomo ordered in March, looking into Vance’s handling of a sex-assault case involving Harvey Weinstein three years ago. That’s far more than a whiff of conflict.
Vance can’t control Schneiderman’s case, and neither can his top people. If Cuomo has to name a special prosecutor, so be it.