The final part of a three part series on the rise, fall and return of Andrew Cuomo by Brian Jones Kraft. Read part one here and part two here.

Cuomo-mania began to wind down as the pandemic settled into a prolonged lockdown and details of the nursing home scandal continued to emerge; Andrew Cuomo’s snowballing cover up of the true scope of deaths would be eventually be the subject of investigations by the New York Attorney General, Congress, and the Department of Justice.

But the beginning of his real downfall began with a tweet. On December 13, 2020, his former advisor Lindsey Boylan accused him of sexual harassment in a widely-reported twitter thread. Other women began responding with stories of their own, until there were eventually almost a dozen.

Together their accusations and testimonies paint a picture of a “systemic, intentional, hostile toxic workplace environment … that perpetuates abusive treatment of people who don’t have power or resources,” as one woman who worked in his Albany office would anonymously tell the Washington Post. It was an office overseen by a bullying but somewhat pathetic governor who, as Charlotte Bennett’s testimony to the Attorney General’s office reads, “would get bored and didn’t really have a life.” In addition to typical workplace sexual harassment, Cuomo would also occasionally ask female staffers to sing and do push-ups, Bennett testified. 

“I really thought the flirting wasn’t about having sex… it was about controlling the relationship,” Karen Hinton, a former Cuomo press aide, told the Washington Post in 2021. 

The harassment was only part of a larger hierarchy of cruelty and petty power games. Cuomo’s habit of pitting staffers against each other yielded an inner circle who turned their viciousness on their own underlings; weakness was either punished with humiliation or preyed upon via sexual harassment. His administration was a place where “walls would literally shake because people were being yelled at so hard,” as an anonymous former aide once told the Times Union.

After Boylan elaborated on her story in an essay she posted on medium, Cuomo acknowledged his accusers had “sincere complaints” and said “I accept full responsibility for my actions.” 

But he denied any wrongdoing or any specific incidents of outright harassment, blaming “generational and cultural shifts” and characterizing any alleged abuse as simply a misunderstanding. According to this “Italian Defense,” Cuomo was merely an old world paesano baffled by 21st century social norms. Increasingly desperate to save face, he gave a speech in front of a bizarre slideshow of images of himself embracing family and fellow politicians at social occasions, saying “I do it with everyone… young and old, straight and LGBTQ… people who I meet on the street.”

Investigations by the NY Attorney General’s office, the state assembly judiciary committee, and US Justice Department would eventually conclude that harassment and illegal retaliation did take place. Facing impeachment, Cuomo resigned that August. 

Behind the scenes, Cuomo’s lawyers set to work applying the full force of their powers against the women who accused him of harassment. They portrayed Boylan as an opportunist colluding with the other accusers, the press, PR companies and more in a grand scheme to take down him down. As the complaints turned into investigations and lawsuits, they unleashed subpoenas and endless requests for the women’s private records, including phone records, internet posts, gynelogical records, eye exams and a decades old record of one woman’s sexual assault.

After all, the women would have to pay out of pocket, whereas Cuomo could exploit the infinite money glitch of a state law that covers legal costs for public employees facing job-related suit. These expenses would go on to do to the tune of $19 million. (The full taxpayer cost including other Cuomo scandals comes in around $60 million.) The “scorched earth” campaign of legal harassment would drag on for years and come to involve dozens of lawyers. 

Even Cuomo’s sister Madeline joined in the smear campaign, messaging with members of a pro Cuomo called We Decide about the ’bimbos’ accusing her brother, who in turn Tweeted at accuser Charlotte Bennett “your life will be dissected like a frog in science class.”

Bennet would drop her suit, saying “throughout this extraordinarily painful two year case, I’ve many times believed that I’d be better off dead.”

 In one instance Cuomo personally informed accuser Karen Hinton’s spouse– (himself a longtime affiliate with links to Cuomo administration scandals) – that “if she goes there, there’s stuff on her that will come out… they have material on Karen that’s not good for her, the kind of thing she wouldn’t want her children to see.” 

Hinton, who Cuomo once described in a memoir as part of his “second family”, would end up moving out of state to avoid the fallout. 

Cuomo laid low for a while, running his consultancy and complaining about ‘wokeness’ on podcasts with the likes of former Trump staffers Anthony Scaramucci and Kellyanne Conway. According to those who knew him though, he was busy ‘scheming’. In March of this year he announced his candidacy for mayor.

 It was an odd choice for someone who had never seemed to care much for New York City itself- and openly didn’t even seem that impressed by the idea of being mayor. True to the suburbanite mentality of someone who hasn’t actually lived in the city for decades, he opened his campaign by talking about crime, portraying post-COVID New York as a lawless wasteland out of Taxi Driver– or maybe something like Trump’s visions of American Carnage.

“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person… You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence…the city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis,” he told voters in his lengthy announcement video.

Many NY politicians who called for his resignation in 2021 started falling in line, chief among them Kirsten Gillibrand. “It’s up to New York voters, it’s not up to me,” Gillibrand told an NY1 reporter about her feeling about Cuomo’s campaign.  

“On a human level, he sounded like he had been on a journey and that he had learned from it,” gushed Andrew Yang to New York magazine. Others simply remained silent.

“It’s incredibly bleak that he’s back at all,” Boylan would tell Huffington Post. “He has no shame. But of course, we live in a time and place that so few bad men in power had shame. Shamelessness seems to be their unique superpower.”

In May, with Cuomo still surging in the polls, the Trump Justice Department opened an investigation in the nursing home scandal. The signal was clear: the administration was waiting.

The two Queens-ites have a history: Trump donated to both Cuomo and his father over the years and even recorded a video message for Cuomo’s bachelor party.  

Though their clashes in 2020 are now a part of the historical record, there seems to be at least a partial element of kayfabe to the relationship. In a 2020 Vanity Fair article, a source described as “a Cuomo associate” characterized the back and forth between the two rich Queens nepotists as “a combination of realpolitik and street shit.” 

“I think Cuomo, in another timeline, is probably super jealous of Trump,” Ana Liss, one the women he harassed, also told Huffington Post. 

When Cuomo derides Mamdani’s lack of experience and predicts Trump would “go through him like a hot knife through butter,”, it’s worth asking how much Cuomo’s ability to bargain with the Trump comes from their incredible personal similarities, or to what degree a Mayor Cuomo, compromised by his scandals, would simply take up Adams’ mantle as a pathetic regime puppet.

Their connections and agendas tend to overlap anyways: Cuomo has taken $90,000 from Alex Karp, the CEO of surveillance juggernaut and ICE contractor Palantir, and a quarter million from Bill Ackman, a billionaire Trump supporter who uses his power and influence to put down Pro Palestine protests at colleges. A strident Zionist, Cuomo also joined the legal team set up by Alan Dershowitz to defend Benjamin Netanyahu against war crimes charges from the International Criminal Court, though Cuomo says he wouldn’t do that if he was elected mayor. 

Shortly before the June primary, Brad Lander, another mayoral candidate, was arrested by masked federal agents in downtown Manhattan. Chaotic footage showed Lander hustled away in handcuffs, before he was briefly held on a clearly phony charge of “assaulting an officer.” Governor Hochul appeared to personally tell ICE to release him. 

Upon release, Landers was greeted by a spontaneously organized rally outside the courthouse, attended by most of the other mayoral candidates, including Zohran Mamdani, who called the arrest ‘fascism’. 

Landers addressed the crowd too, noting that the real concern should be for Edguardo, the man he was escorting to court,now in ICE custody in an unknown location. He thanked the crowd and the other candidates present. 

“Was Andrew Cuomo one of them?” he jokingly asked a journalist. “Imagine that.”

Brian Jones Kraft is a writer based in Bushwick.