Harassment alleged
Former Executive Chamber employee says governor “sexually harassed me for years”
Former Executive Chamber employee says Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo “sexually harassed me for years.”/
A former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo alleged in a tweet Sunday morning that the governor “sexually harassed me for years.”
The accusation was leveled by Lindsey Boylan, who worked from 2015 to 2018 as Cuomo’s deputy secretary for economic development and as a special adviser. Boylan has in recent days complained on social media about the work environment she experienced in the Executive Chamber.
“Yes, @Nygovcuomo sexually harassed me for years,” Boylan wrote within a Twitter thread devoted to the subject of workplace sexual harassment. “Many saw it, and watched. I could never anticipate what to expect: would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks. Or would it be both in the same conversation? This was the way for years.”
“Not knowing what to expect what’s the most upsetting part aside from knowing that no one would do a damn thing even when they saw it,” she continued. “No one. And I *know* I am not the only woman. ... I hate that some men, like @Nygovcuomo abuse their power.”
Cuomo’s press secretary, Caitlin Girouard, emailed a response on Sunday afternoon to Boylan’s tweets: “There is simply no truth to these claims.”
Boylan’s Sunday thread came a week after a Twitter thread in which she described a work environment where a handful of close Cuomo advisers exert control and the rest of the staff in his office feels marginalized. She alleged that if you’re not “one of those handful, your life working for him is endlessly dispiriting.”
“If people weren’t deathly afraid of him, they’d be saying the same thing and you’d already know the stories,” Boylan wrote of the governor. “Seriously, the messages and texts I receive when I speak the truth about this. ... It’s a whole book of people who have been harmed.”
The Times Union interviewed three women who worked in the executive chamber for Cuomo for more than 15 years combined, but have each since left. They were contacted independently by the newspaper; they spoke on the condition of anonymity as they weren’t familiar with Boylan’s specific claims of being personally harassed. They said the culture described by Boylan did not match their own experiences working for Cuomo.
“I never once saw him berate or treat a staffer in a way that was unbecoming. I just never saw it. And to me ... there’s a lot of things that could be said about the governor, but sexual harassment, it just boggles my mind,” said the first, who worked in a manager-level role for a number of years.
“Not to say it may not be true, but it’s very difficult for me to believe it,” she said.
The second said she had been “racking her brain” all morning
trying to think if she’d ever heard of the governor harassing a woman after seeing Boylan’s tweets, and she said she couldn’t come up with anyone. The third said she “never felt or observed any sexual harassment, period.”
All three women said that working for the governor is demanding and high-stress, and that Cuomo can be a tough boss.
But they conveyed that that is what one should expect when one works in high levels of government.
One of the women, when asked whether Cuomo speaks sharply to staff, paused for several seconds before answering slowly that “he expects a lot,” and, pausing again, she added that he can be demanding and strongly worded.
“I wouldn’t question that someone would perceive it as bullying,” she said, but she instead perceived it as directness.
Boylan stated on Twitter that she tried three times to quit Cuomo’s office “before it stuck.” She also suggested she’d declined to sign some type of nondisclosure agreement when leaving the job, stating that she did not “sign whatever they told me to sign when I left.”
Last week, Cuomo’s senior adviser Rich Azzopardi denied that Boylan was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
The women contacted by the Times Union said they weren’t pressured to stay, the way Boylan said she was.
They said that they were never asked to sign an NDA, and that they couldn’t imagine anyone else being asked to. One of them said she was thrown a going-away party when she left that was attended by senior staff.
Boylan is in the midst of a political campaign, running in the 2021 election for Manhattan borough president. In June, Boylan lost a Democratic primary for U.S. Congress to incumbent U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler.
“To be clear: I have no interest in talking to journalists,” she wrote in a subsequent tweet to the one alleging the harassment. Boylan didn’t respond to a call or text from the Times Union after she sent her first tweets on the subject last week.
The Times Union obtained 2018 internal personnel records from the Executive Chamber, which show that Boylan herself was accused of bullying, harassing behavior while she worked for the governor, which ultimately led to her resignation.
Three Black women reported that Boylan had yelled at them and “treated them like children.” This led to a meeting with Cuomo’s head lawyer where Boylan offered to resign.
Boylan told the lawyer that she regretted that “her directness can be perceived in a certain, negative way (contrary to her intentions),” the records show.