Cuomo accuser goes public over ‘assaults in governor’s mansion’
AN ASSISTANT to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went public yesterday to accuse the Democrat of twice sexually assaulting her at his home and “turning her dream job into a nightmare”.
Brittany Commisso described how the three-term governor, who is now fighting for his political life, fondled her breast and her bottom in the Executive Mansion in Albany, the capital of New York state, on two separate occasions.
The 32-year-old is one of the 11 women who Mr Cuomo was accused of sexually harassing in a damning investigation by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.
She was identified only as “Executive Assistant #1” in the report, but decided to speak out in an interview with CBS News after hearing the 63-year-old governor deny the allegations.
Mrs Commisso said she was summoned to the mansion, where she says that she was groped once in December 2019 and again in November 2020, when Mr Cuomo allegedly hugged her in what she described as a “sexually aggressive manner”. “These were not hugs he would give his mother or his brother. These were hugs to get some sort of personal sexual satisfaction out of,” said Mrs Commisso.
“He came back to me and that’s when he put his hand up my blouse and cupped my breast over my bra,” she added. Mrs Commisso last week filed a criminal complaint against the governor. Mr Cuomo denies touching Mrs Commisso inappropriately, saying of the second allegation: “To touch a woman’s breasts, who I hardly know, in the mansion with 10 staff around, with my family in the mansion, to say, ‘I don’t care who sees us.’ I would have to lose my mind to do such a thing.”
The governor, who has risen to become one of the most powerful Democrats, has denied wrongdoing even as calls for him to resign have grown, including from Joe Biden, the US president.
♦ The head of a fund providing restitution to victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuses said she had finished the claims process, and awarded nearly $125 million (£90million) to about 150 eligible claimants.