Poison politics of Cuomo a warning to all
You do not need to be a New Yorker to profit from reading New York Attorney General Letitia James’s report on allegations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo harassed 11 women. The 165-page document released Tuesday will be studied for decades as a concise explanation of how power is deployed and abused in modern politics.
It is also a study in courage.
The 11 victims knew what they were risking when they spoke of their ordeals with the leering, unyielding three-term Democrat. Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo aide and the first to come forward with her experience, endured a Niagara of abuse as Cuomo’s palace guard sought to diminish her and discourage others.
Cuomo’s top aides were ruthless and proud of it. They enjoyed their reputations for cruelty. They reserved a particularly lethal strand of poison for anyone who crossed them, no one more so than Boylan. One of her complaints was that the creepy governor made a comment to her about wanting to play strip poker on a 2017 flight across New York.
The strip poker gambit was one more harassment Boylan, who served in a high-ranking position in Cuomo’s administration, suffered from the governor. She tweeted about Cuomo’s behavior last December. In March, Boylan wrote a piece with details of her experience and posted it on the website medium.com. In it, she invited others to come forward.
A ferocious reaction from Cuomo and his enforcers followed Boylan’s damning revelations. Four others on the flight joined in an emphatic public statement written in Cuomo’s office denying the governor had said anything about strip poker. Cuomo’s thugs were not done. Boylan’s call for other women to speak out about their experiences represented the most lethal threat to Cuomo and his poisonous entourage. They knew and they have long known that they