Feared Cuomo ‘enablers,’ accuser says in TV interview
ALBANY, N.Y. — An aide who accused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of groping her said in her first televised interview that she was initially afraid to identify herself because she worried the governor’s “enablers” would destroy her if she spoke up.
Brittany Commisso, an executive assistant on Cuomo’s staff, detailed her interactions with the Democrat in an interview with CBS and The Times Union of Albany that was broadcast Monday as a key legislative committee met to discuss possible impeachment hearings.
Commisso has spoken out before, first in an anonymous interview with the Times Union last winter, and then as one of 11 women who said they were sexually harassed by Cuomo whose allegations were detailed in a report by the state attorney general’s office last week. She was also the first woman to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo, giving a report to the county sheriff Thursday.
“I was afraid that if I had to come forward and revealed my name, that the governor and his enablers, I like to call them, would viciously attack me, would smear my name, as I had seen and heard them do before to people,” said Commisso, now 32.
She said she also wanted to protect her daughter, but now feels speaking out shows her that “she has a voice.”
“I never want her to be afraid of any person in power, a man or a woman,” Commisso said.
The interview aired as Cuomo faced another day under fire.
The Assembly’s judiciary committee met in executive session Monday to discuss how to wrap up a probe of Cuomo’s conduct with women and other matters, including the use of staff to help with his $5 million book deal and his administration’s decision to withhold full statistics on covid-19 deaths in nursing homes from the public.
Committee Chair Charles Lavine and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie promised to wrap up their inquiry and potentially have a vote on articles of impeachment “within weeks,” but they also laid out a timetable that is likely to disappoint people who want Cuomo out of office now.
The judiciary committee will continue to meet in private through at least Aug. 23 to discuss the evidence. It plans to hold public hearings featuring testimony from experts on sexual harassment and on impeachment procedures. Any vote to start an impeachment trial would then trigger a 30-day period for Cuomo to respond.
Lavine said the committee wanted to make sure any articles of impeachment were “airtight.”
ADVOCATE RESIGNS
Meanwhile the leader of Time’s Up, the #MeToo-era organization founded by Hollywood women to fight sexual harassment, resigned under fire Monday for advising Cuomo’s administration behind the scenes in its effort to discredit one of his accusers.
Time’s Up said in a tweet that it agreed with Roberta Kaplan that stepping down as chair of the group’s board of directors was “the right and appropriate thing to do.”
Kaplan, a women’s rights advocate who has a law practice of her own, counseled the administration last winter when Cuomo was hit with the first of the harassment allegations, leveled by a former economic development adviser, Lindsey Boylan.
Both Kaplan and Alphonso David, leader of the Human Rights Campaign, were consulted over a letter the Cuomo administration had drafted attacking Boylan’s credibility. Kaplan and David agreed to review the letter.
According to the attorney general’s report, Kaplan told the administration that with some adjustments, the letter would be fine to send out. David, a former counsel to Cuomo, declined to sign the letter but agreed to contact other people to see if they would. Other advisers, though, said it was a bad idea, and the letter was never widely disseminated.
Several past backers of Time’s Up sent an open letter Monday demanding an investigation, accusing that that the organization’s leaders “align themselves with abusers at the expense of survivors.”