New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated Tuesday he would resign over a barrage of sexual harassment allegations in a fall from grace a 12 months after he was extensively hailed nationally for his detailed each day briefings and management through the darkest days of COVID-19.
The three-term Democratic governor’s resolution, which is able to take impact in two weeks, was introduced as momentum constructed within the Legislature to take away him by impeachment. It got here after New York’s lawyer basic launched the outcomes of an investigation that discovered Cuomo sexually harassed at the least 11 ladies.
Investigators stated he subjected ladies to undesirable kisses; groped their breasts or buttocks or in any other case touched them inappropriately; made insinuating remarks about their seems to be and their intercourse lives; and created a piece surroundings “rife with fear and intimidation.”
“The best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to government,” Cuomo stated at a press briefing.
Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a 62-year-old Democrat and former member of Congress from the Buffalo space, will change into the state’s 57th governor and the primary lady to carry the publish.
The #MeToo-era scandal reduce quick not only a profession however a dynasty: Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, was governor within the Eighties and ’90s, and the youthful Cuomo was typically talked about as a possible candidate for president, an workplace his father famously contemplated in search of. Even because the scandal mushroomed, Cuomo was planning to run for reelection in 2022.
Cuomo nonetheless faces the potential for felony expenses, with plenty of prosecutors across the state transferring to analyze him.
The string of accusations that spelled the governor’s downfall started to unfold in information stories final December and went on for months.
Cuomo referred to as a number of the allegations fabricated, forcefully denying he touched anybody inappropriately. But he acknowledged making some aides uncomfortable with feedback he stated he supposed as playful, and he apologized for a few of his conduct.
He portrayed a number of the encounters as misunderstandings attributable to “generational or cultural” variations, a reference partially to his upbringing in an affectionate Italian American household.
As a defiant Cuomo clung to workplace, state lawmakers launched an impeachment investigation, and almost your entire Democratic institution in New York abandoned him — not solely over the accusations, but in addition due to the invention that his administration had hid 1000’s of COVID-19 deaths amongst nursing house sufferers.
The harassment investigation ordered up by the lawyer basic and performed by two outdoors attorneys corroborated the ladies’s accounts and added lurid new ones. The launch of the report left the governor extra remoted than ever, with a few of his most loyal supporters abandoning him and President Joe Biden becoming a member of these calling on him to resign.
His accusers included an aide who stated Cuomo groped her breast on the governor’s mansion. Investigators additionally the governor’s workers retaliated towards one among his accusers by leaking confidential personnel information about her.
As governor, Cuomo touted himself for example of a “progressive Democrat” who will get issues finished: Since taking workplace in 2011, he helped push by means of laws that legalized homosexual marriage, started lifting the minimal wage to $15 and expanded paid household depart advantages. He additionally backed large infrastructure tasks, together with airport overhauls and development of a brand new bridge over the Hudson River that he named after his father.
At the identical time the conduct that received him into hassle was occurring, he was publicly championing the #MeToo motion and surrounding himself with ladies’s rights activists, signing into regulation sweeping new protections towards sexual harassment and lengthening the statute of limitations in rape circumstances.
His nationwide recognition soared through the harrowing spring of 2020, when New York grew to become the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak.
His tough-minded however empathetic response made for riveting tv effectively past New York, and his stern warnings to folks to remain house and put on masks stood in sharp distinction to President Donald Trump’s brush-off of the virus. His briefings received a global Emmy Award, and he went on to put in writing a e-book on management in a disaster.
But even these accomplishments have been quickly tainted when it was realized that the state’s official depend of nursing house deaths had excluded many sufferers who had been transferred to hospitals earlier than they succumbed. A Cuomo aide acknowledged the administration feared the true numbers could be “used against us” by the Trump White House.
Also, Cuomo’s administration was fiercely criticized for forcing nursing houses to simply accept sufferers recovering from the virus.
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the state’s dealing with of information on nursing house deaths. In addition, the state lawyer basic is trying into whether or not Cuomo broke the regulation in utilizing members of his workers to assist write and promote his e-book, from which he stood to make greater than $5 million.
The governor had additionally more and more come underneath fireplace over his tough and generally vindictive therapy of fellow politicians and his personal workers, with former aides telling tales of a brutal work surroundings.
Cuomo has been divorced since 2005 from the creator and activist Kerry Kennedy, a member of the Kennedy household, and was romantically concerned up till 2019 with TV life-style persona Sandra Lee. He has three grownup daughters.
During his resignation speech, he instantly addressed his daughters, saying: “I want them to know, from the bottom of my heart: I never did, and I never would, intentionally disrespect a woman or treat a woman differently than I would want them treated. Your dad made mistakes. And he apologized. And he learned from it. And that’s what life is all about.”
He gained political expertise early on as his father’s hard-nosed and sometimes ruthless marketing campaign supervisor, and went on to change into New York lawyer basic and U.S. housing secretary underneath President Bill Clinton earlier than getting elected governor in 2010.
New York has seen a string of high-level political figures introduced down in shame lately.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in 2008 in a call-girl scandal. Rep. Anthony Weiner went to jail for sexting with a 15-year-old lady. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman stepped down in 2018 after 4 ladies accused him of abuse. And the highest two leaders within the Legislature have been convicted of corruption.