QUID PRO CUO
Creep’s panic pitch: I won’t run again if you don’t impeach
In a desperate bid, Gov. Cuomo proposed to state legislators that he wouldn’t run for a fourth term if they promised not to impeach him, state Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs told The Post. “I shot it down pretty quick,” Jacobs said. “Either you can survive the AG’s report and run again or you don’t survive the
AG’s report.” Meanwhile, two more women made allegations to the Attorney General, joining Brittany Commisso (pictured with Cuomo), but were told the investigation was closed and they needed to talk to local law enforcement.
The former aide who has lodged the most serious accusations against Gov. Cuomo went public in a new interview, claiming he groped and hugged her for “personal sexual satisfaction” — and turned her “dream job . . . into a nightmare.”
Brittany Commisso, previously known only as “Executive Assistant #1,” tearfully detailed what she called unwanted touching during creepy encounters with Cuomo, for whom she started working in 2017.
“These were not hugs he would give his mother or his brother. These are hugs with the intention of getting some personal sexual satisfaction out of it,” Commisso (inset), 32, said on “CBS This Morning” in an interview that aired Monday.
“And then they started to be hugs with kisses on the cheek. And then there was, at one point, a hug and when he went to kiss me on the cheek, he quickly turned his head and kissed me on the lips.
“He thought this was normal to me and the other women that he did this to,” she added of the incident at the Executive Mansion in Albany. “It was not normal, it was not welcome, and it was certainly not consensual.”
Commisso alleges that on New Year’s Eve 2019, Cuomo, now 63, groped her after she helped him with his State of the State speech.
After he suggested taking a selfie, “He was to my left . . . With my right hand, I took the selfie,” she recalled. “I then felt, while taking the selfie, his hand goes down my back onto my butt, and he started rubbing it. Not sliding it. Not, you know, quickly brushing over it — rubbing my butt.”
She said she was so “nervous” that her hands began shaking, so the selfies she took were blurry.
“I remember looking at [the selfies] and when he said, ‘Can I see them?’ I showed him them,” she recounted. “And he said, ‘Oh, those aren’t — those aren’t good,’ ” and he suggested they sit down.
“So we sat down on the couch and in the photo I have my arm wrapped around his shoulder, almost as if we were taking a picture with a buddy. And I got a clear photo sitting down,” she said.
That selfie was released last week as part of state Attorney General Letitia James’ report accusing Cuomo of sexually harassing 11 women — including Commisso, whose face was blurred out.
After the New Year’s incident, the mom of one claims he groped her a second time in November 2020 at the mansion.
“He goes to give me a hug. It was probably the most sexually aggressive manner than any of the hugs,” she said. “It was then I said, ‘You’re going to get us in trouble.’ I thought to myself, ‘That probably wasn’t the best thing to say.’ I was so afraid the mansion staff were going to come up and see it,” she recalled.
Commisso said Cuomo then “shut the door so hard” that she thought someone downstairs would think something was going on.
She alleges Cuomo slipped his hand up her shirt and placed his “large hand” on her bra — before leaving without saying a word.
In March, the governor denied inappropriately touching staffers following an avalanche of accusers — a denial that prompted Commisso to come forward.
“I know the truth. He knows the truth. I know what happened and so does he,” she said.
“He almost has this smirk that he thinks that he’s untouchable. I almost feel like he has this sense of almost a celebrity status and it just — that was the tipping point. I broke down. I said, ‘He is lying.’ ”
Meanwhile Monday, another Cuomo accuser said he once refused to hire a woman because she wasn’t “pretty enough.”
Karen Hinton, who worked as his press aide when he was Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, told The Post that during that time, he conducted a job interview with a woman who had “worked on Capitol Hill for years.”
“I sat in since I had recommended her, and he said to me after, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” Hinton said. ”I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘She’s not pretty enough. I don’t like the way she looks.’”
Hinton has accused Cuomo of having been physically “aroused” when he hugged her “too tightly” and for “too long” in 2000.