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Lindsey Boylan, former Governor Andrew Cuomo aide, pens bombshell essay detailing allegations of sexual harassment A former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo published a lengthy essay on Wednesday morning accusing the governor of harassment and outlining several unsettling episodes, including an unsolicited kiss in his Manhattan office.
The aide, Lindsey Boylan, described several years of uncomfortable interactions with Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, including a call for participation to play poker on a government airplane and an email from another top aide suggesting that the governor thought she was a “better-looking sister” of another woman.
lindsey boylan who worked for the state’s economic development agency at the time, published that email from December 2016, and said the government began calling her the opposite woman’s name in professional settings, an experience she described as “degrading.”
Mr. Cuomo’s administration, already reeling from an issue over his handling of nursing homes, denied Ms. Boylan’s accusations. In 2018, after being promoted to a senior adviser position, Boylan claims Cuomo “stepped ahead of me and kissed me on the lips” during a one-on-one meeting at the governor’s Manhattan office. The unwanted advance from New York’s most powerful Democrat came after years of harassment, she says.
Today I am telling my story. I never planned to share the details of my experience working in the Cuomo administration, but I am doing so now in hopes that it may make it easier for others to speak their own truth. https://t.co/n1Lcc6Ac66
— Lindsey Boylan (@LindseyBoylan) February 24, 2021
Screenshots shared alongside the essay show emails from Cuomo secretary Stephanie Benton allegedly passing along a message from the governor insinuating that Boylan was his type because she seemed like one among his former flames. “He said search Lisa Shields. you’ll be sisters. Except you’re the higher looking sister,” the 2016 email from Benton reads.
Cuomo went on to call Boylan “Lisa” ahead of colleagues, she writes.
“I had complained to friends that the Governor would leave of his thanks to touching me on my lower back, arms and legs,” she writes. “His senior staff began keeping tabs on my whereabouts.”
Ex-Aide Details Sexual Harassment Claims Against Gov. Cuomo
Cuomo also made unflattering comments about women’s weight and “ridiculed them about their romantic relationships and significant others,” Boylan adds. Ms. Boylan wrote that in her youth working for the Cuomo administration, her boss at New York Development had once told her that “the governor had a ‘crush’ on me.” She added that Mr. Cuomo had gone “out of his thanks to touching me on my lower back, arms, and legs.”
“His senior staff began keeping tabs on my whereabouts,” she wrote, publishing an email from 2016, during which a top aide to Mr. Cuomo asked Ms. Boylan’s boss if she was getting to be attending an occasion . The attention from the governor also included a personal invitation to his office in late 2016, Ms. Boylan said when she says he showed her a box Mr. Cuomo said he received from President Clinton when he served in his administration, as Secretary of Housing and concrete Development.
“The two-decade-old regard to President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky wasn’t lost on me,” she said.
In October 2017, Ms. Boylan wrote, the governor joked that they ought to play poker while on a flight back from an occasion in Western NY. the 2 were in close quarters, sitting across from each other on the plane, with a press aide and a trooper sitting nearby.
Ms. Boylan said she replied: “That’s exactly what I used to be thinking,” during a sarcastic manner.
“I tried to play it cool,” she wrote within the essay, which was published on Medium. “But therein moment, I noticed just how acquiescent I had become.” On Wednesday, the governor’s office disputed her account, releasing a press release from four current and former administration officials who were aboard one or more of the four flights in October 2017 — including three from Western NY — where Ms. Boylan had accompanied the governor.
“We were on each of those October flights and this conversation didn’t happen,” said the statement, signed by John Maggiore, Howard Zemsky, Dani Lever, and Abbey Fashouer Collins. Beyond the flight, the governor’s office addressed few other specific details of Ms. Boylan’s account.
Andrew Cuomo , whose only public appearance on Wednesday happened hours before Ms. Boylan’s essay was published, didn’t directly address the new allegations. But in December, when Ms. Boylan first went public, the governor vehemently denied the accusations.
“Look, I fought for and that I believe a lady has the proper to return forward and express her opinion and express issues and concerns that she has,” Mr. Cuomo said during a press conference last year. “But it’s just not true.”
On Wednesday, The NY Times spoke to 3 people that worked within the governor’s office during Ms. Boylan’s time there. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while they might not corroborate her allegations, they concurred that the governor would sometimes make inappropriate remarks during work and discuss people’s appearances. Early Wednesday evening, the governor’s office facilitated a press release to the days from Ashley Cotton, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo when he was state’s attorney general, an edge he left in 2010.
