Powerful men, their enablers, and victims

Every story about a fallen, powerful man includes a cadre of enablers who protected him from public exposure, until they couldn’t. This is true of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has announced he will resign in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal.

The coverage has been just this side of apocalyptic. The impossible has happened, say pundits who did their part to magnify the mythology of Cuomo as too strong and stubborn to give up. The earth trembled, the storm clouds roiled, and the fortress of sycophants who had kept his secrets began to crumble. A year after being crowned America’s governor, he was abandoned. With no allies to prop him up, the giant toppled to the ground. What a bunch of hooey. An investigation by the state’s attorney general found that Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 women. This included allegedly groping a woman’s breast. The report also detailed Cuomo’s devoted group of enablers.

Joon Kim, a lead investigator, on Cuomo’s inner circle: “The Executive Chamber responded to allegations of sexual harassment in ways that violated their own internal policies and also constituted unlawful retaliation with respect to one of the complainants. … The Executive Chamber workplace culture – rife with bullying, fear and intimidation – on the one hand while normalizing frequent flirtations and gender-based comments by the governor on the other, created the conditions that allowed the sexual harassment and retaliation to occur and to persist.” Fear reigned.

I was one of millions of victims

Any woman who has been sexually harassed by a boss knows how this works. The higher up he is in the chain of command, the more people who stand between you and the man who has made your life a living hell.

I’m one of millions of such women. In the ’90s, an editor with a fondness for shoulder rubs repeatedly made inappropriate comments to me, and he did it in front of others because that was the newsroom culture. Once, he came up to my desk and asked, loudly, when we were going to get a hotel room “and get away from all this.”

I was a new hire, and a newly single mother going through a difficult divorce. I was an opportunity, as he saw it. Even after an anonymous colleague reported his misconduct and I was summoned to HR, I failed to pursue a complaint.

I was afraid of losing my job in a time when I was trying to prove I could give my daughter a good home.

I was his enabler.

Three months later, I saw that same editor start to rub the shoulders of a young intern, who was visibly uncomfortable. All these years later, I remember my immediate thought: I could have stopped this. So I did, with the help of other colleagues, men and women, who were willing to talk about his pattern of sexual harassment in the newsroom. That’s how quickly power can shift. One person is willing to speak out, and others find their courage. Victims become warriors. That’s the only reason I’m sharing my story.

I know what it feels like to be afraid to speak out, and I am forever grateful to those who were willing to do so for me. They taught me how to be an ally.

During his news conference, Cuomo said he wanted his three daughters “to know from the bottom of my heart that I never did, and I never would, intentionally disrespect a woman or treat any woman differently than I would want them treated. And that is the God’s honest truth. Your dad made mistakes, and he apologized, and he learned from it.”

Yes, well. If indeed he had “learned from it,” he would not have, yet again, denied any wrongdoing. Even when addressing his daughters, publicly, he chose to further disrespect women.

Age is no excuse

We don’t know how his daughters feel about all of this, and it’s a whole lot of none of our business. They are more than their father’s worst moments. They are also the daughters of Kerry Kennedy, the longtime human rights activist. The refuge of anonymity may be closed to them, but love knows no such boundaries. No matter how public one’s life, there is powerful healing to be found in the private company of people who cherish you.

For me, one of the more fascinating moments of Cuomo’s news conference was his attempt to use his age as an excuse: “In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate, and I should have. No excuses.”

He sounds like an 85-year-old retired ad exec steeped in the good old days when every boss was a white guy with a suburban family and an apartment in the city for extramarital romps.

Cuomo and I were born in the same year, 1957. How is it that I, a kid in small town Ohio, grew up immersed in those “generational and cultural shifts” while Cuomo, a lifelong New Yorker, claims never to have been exposed to such upheavals?

I don’t really need an answer.