With Donald Trump out of the White House, the walls can finally close in on the media’s once-favorite foil to the former president. But despite the treatment of negative news about Andrew Cuomo as a revelation, we’ve all known who the New York governor is for a long time. It’s finally just convenient for his cheerleaders in the press to face the facts.
The latest twist in the Cuomo saga is the string of allegations from women alleging he sexually harassed them. Former staffer Lindsey Boylan, who had previously accused him of verbally sexually harassing her, revealed that he had forced an unwanted kiss upon her at work. The New York Times then corroborated the claims of Charlotte Bennett, another former aide, who had told multiple people at the time that Cuomo had come on to her.
Although the Democrat claims that he “never inappropriately touched anybody” or “propositioned anybody,” he confessed that he does “on occasion, tease people in what [he] think[s] is a good-natured way,” apologizing if his interactions “may have been insensitive or too personal.”
Journalists covering Albany have known for years that Cuomo is a bully and brute, and anyone pretending he hasn’t been a creep is willfully ignorant. Here’s just one publicly available clip from the 2016 New York State Fair of Cuomo demanding that a pretty young journalist “eat the whole sausage” in a sandwich.
just thinking back to that time NY Governor Andrew Cuomo hounded a local news reporter to “eat the whole sausage” pic.twitter.com/EyNxFavOyG
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) February 28, 2021
Beth Cefalu, the journalist in question, says that she did not feel harassed, and it’s not up to outside observers to brand people victims when they clearly say they aren’t. But this does enhance the credibility that Boylan’s and Bennett’s claims clearly demonstrate a pattern of behavior that the media has simply chosen to ignore.
And all of this ignores the likely criminal conduct of Cuomo forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, granting them immunity, and then intentionally covering up the death count to obstruct the Trump Justice Department from investigating him. These facts we’ve known for nearly a year, and yet, the media still feted Cuomo as the holy ruler of the #Resistance. It’s only now that they no longer need an antagonist to Trump that the press can listen to what some of us have been pointing out since May.
One in a little more than 400 New Yorkers has died of the coronavirus, meaning that if New York were a country, it would have the worst death rate from the pandemic on the planet. Even ignoring the regular corruption of Cuomo’s career, we’ve had ample evidence that he was a negligent creep at best and a predatory killer at worst. We should have always cared, and even if all’s well that ends well, it’s still a tragedy that it took political expedience for the press to give a damn.
