Cuomo faces claims from a current aide
Alyssa McGrath, who works for the New York governor’s office, described unsettling interactions for The New York Times.
ALBANY, N.Y. — He called her and her co-worker “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 M. 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 the governor had asked her not to talk about the alleged incident, knowing 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 conducted 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 in his office. It was something she said was compounded and protected by a demand for secrecy, and normalized inside the governor’s inner circle.
McGrath did not accuse the governor of making sexual contact, though she said that she believed that his actions amounted to sexual harassment.
“He has a way of making you feel very comfortable around him, almost like you’re his friend,” McGrath said. “But then you walk away from the encounter or conversation, in your head going, ‘I can’t believe I just had that interaction with the governor of New York.’”