There are 4.4 million women in New York City. How many of them will we allow Andrew Cuomo to assault?
Local and national Democrat must stop rehabilitating creeps for public office. Sexual harassers are bad leaders; Democrats are dooming us to political mismanagement and losses of women's rights
Let’s start off with the most important thing: Andrew Cuomo shouldn't even have the audacity to show his face in public after being forced to resign in 2021 for his history of sexual assault.
Now, to talk about why.
It’s not just that Cuomo is one of the most sleazy, corrupt, out of control politicians to ever darken the threshold of the governor’s mansion in Albany, nor that the only state policy he ever consistently upheld was that of using his position to advance his own vindictiveness, nor that every time he was given even a little power, he immediately abused it. (More on all of that below).
No, the problem is that the Democratic Party, locally and nationally — and many of its powerful supporters — continues to be a complete failure at the basic task of respecting women, who are the majority of Democratic voters.
Ever since the Democratic party dismissed Bill Clinton’s alleged serial rapes as “bimbo eruptions” back in the 1990s, and then again ignored Clinton’s ties to global sex traffickers, women who are registered Democrats, or even Democratic-leaning independents, have been in hell. It’s just been one Democratic attempt after another to bring back sexual harassers, accused rapists, and creeps.
From The Guardian after Democrats trotted out Clinton at the DNC in August 2024 to thunderous applause:
Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.
These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.
All of this can also be said of Andrew Cuomo.
(And, not incidentally, also of fellow Democrat Anthony Weiner, who took a picture of his erection while sleeping next to his four-year-old son, who he called a “chick magnet” and then texted the snap to a sex worker; Weiner is now, somehow, running for City Council.)
Cuomo is not just a candidate, he’s the test of a failing Democratic political strategy to keep the party old and sclerotic: Keeping ancient, passive Islamophobic relics like Chuck Schumer in office and reanimating losers like Cuomo, all to avoid a young, vivacious bench of young people with new and better ideas. The Democratic Party is obsessed with keeping power, then squandering it. Mamdani, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before him, is an existential threat to the local Democratic Party’s stubborn gerontocracy because he has workable plans and policy ideas. Nationally, the Democratic Party fired David Hogg, a young DNC vice chair who suggested primarying the endless parade of old narcissists who cling to office for decades long past normal retirement age; Democratic officials including Randi Weingarten resigned in protest because the party is so “out of step” with the electorate. “Democrats want to fight Trump, but keep fighting each other,” The Washington Post concluded, with acid disapproval of the Democrats’ messy refusal to look towards the future —or even, really, the present.
That’s why Cuomo, 67 and well past retirement age himself, is running for mayor; to preserve the gerontocracy, the ugly status quo of Democratic stagnation and inaction. Cuomo, if elected, would be the city’s oldest-ever mayor; previously, the oldest mayor was David Dinkins, elected (to only one term) when he was a relatively spry 62. Cuomo is already a senior citizen; if he serves four years he would leave office at 72. Meanwhile, the greatest demographic concentration of New York’s population is 25 to 39 years old; not only does Cuomo have nothing to offer them, his open disdain for Mamdani’s age has shown that Cuomo doesn’t even want to represent anyone younger than him.
The fact that disgraced fossils like Cuomo can run for office — and find party support — is exactly why the Democratic Party is stalling out. It’s losing its own base, certainly, since 52% of Democratic voters disapprove of the party’s strategy and say that Democrats should put in some work to stop Republicans. (Instead, Democrats keep passing Republican bills and praising openly fascist Republican policy like the abductions currently being committed by masked ICE officers.)
This repetitive Democratic Party strategy to root around in the bottom of the barrel for older men, even and especially creepy older men, to stand for political office has real consequences: The Democratic Party’s insistence on clinging to Clinton paved the way for Trump to argue, successfully, that the sexual assault accusations against him should be ignored too. Then Trump himself opened the way for more sexual harassers to parade their way into public office and the Supreme Court. As a result, we are mired in a regressive pre-women’s rights environment of male politicians hostile to women and women’s advancement because they treat women as sexual objects to be used and discarded.
And not surprisingly, the rise of rehabilitating these sexual abusers and installing them into power has coincided with significant rollbacks in women’s rights under both former president Biden and Trump. What a coincidence.
Lindsey Boylan, who was the first to come forward about Cuomo’s harassment, put the cost of a Cuomo candidacy very clearly in an interview with the Associated Press about the silence of the Democratic Party:
“I don’t think anything has specifically changed with women being angry about how our rights are being taken away,” she said. “But the fact is that most of our leaders are more interested in staying comfortable and staying in their jobs than actually protecting us and defending us. That’s gotten much worse.”
We are talking about a Democratic party so lost, so badly run, so disrespectful towards it own voters, that has shown repeatedly it has no room for stalwart supporters who are Palestinian, or Arabs, but its tent is apparently always big enough for another old, white sex creep.
The majority of registered Democratic voters — 51% — are women, and yet Democrats cannot stop rehabilitating creeps like Cuomo and running them for public office.
It’s disrespectful, we deserve better, and it has to stop.
Now let’s look at this strange week in New York City politics — not that we ever have normal ones. It’s a week that shows that Cuomo’s genuinely appalling behavior towards women has been all but forgotten — and thus forgiven — by the people who influence Democratic politics.
Let’s start with the worst: The New York Times violated its two-year self-imposed hibernation from issuing endorsements in local politics…only to write a bizarre editorial attacking a leading candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, for an alleged “lack of experience” even though Mamdani has been a city assemblyman and has far more experience with both city politics and politics, period, than the Times’ terrible suggested alternatives: A hedge fund manager who has never served in public office, Whitney Tilson, and disgraced former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo? He has political experience, sure, but experience comprised entirely of decades of political failure. Don’t we want someone with successful political experience? Isn’t that what “political experience” is supposed to mean? The Times Union in Albany, baffled by Cuomo’s rehabilitation in politics, attributed the fact that he even has a candidacy to mass “amnesia.”
In an editorial firmly titled “Don’t Rank Cuomo,” the Times Union said what The New York Times should have: That “Mr. Cuomo’s return is also due to people who should know better giving the political equivalent of a shrug and acting as if his abuses of power were no big deal.” (Emphasis mine.) The Times Union (correctly) blamed powerful Democrats like New York’s junior Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, for indulging him.
Leaving aside the rest of the Times editorial —which is unfortunately floundering and incoherent — anyone who has paid even minimal attention to politics over the past 15 years could have only one thought:
Andrew Cuomo? A storied publication like the New York Times is taking a disgraced sexual harasser seriously as a candidate for public office? Without even mentioning why he was forced to resign in disgrace?
The Times waved away Cuomo’s assaults of nearly a dozen women (emphasis mine) as somehow not relevant to the work of governing a city that has 4.4 million women:
“As for (Andrew) Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”
Is assaulting over a dozen women just a matter of “ethics and conduct”?
No. It’s far more than that.
When a man is a sexual harasser, it’s not an isolated part of his behavior. It’s a character issue. Sexual harassment indicates a contemptuous, dismissive approach to other people’s safety and wellbeing that points to a fundamental lack of integrity. It almost always pairs with other disastrous failures in character like corruption and a willingness to violate ethics. (Both are offenses which Cuomo has committed repeatedly.) When a man is a sexual harasser, it’s not a private behavior, as it’s often dismissed; it’s a public and professional trait that tells us several things about how he leads and how he governs. Such as:
He enjoys abusing his power over others. This has obvious implications for a political chief executive, and we know that Cuomo does, in fact, enjoy abusing his power over everyone, including fellow politicians. “He is a vindictive person,” former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, accurately. Now extrapolate this to someone who wants to manage a city of 8 million people. New York City has a lot of vulnerable people — women, minorities, the homeless, poor and working-class families — and they deserve a lot better than a rich, small-minded abuser who wants to make already-hurting people suffer even more and feel helpless just to affirm his own power.
He especially enjoys abusing his power over people he perceives as vulnerable. Many of the women that Cuomo assaulted or harassed worked around him, and he believed they were easy marks. Cuomo abused the labor of New York State prison inmates being paid 16 cents an hour, to force them to “make” 11 million bottles of hand sanitizer at 16 cents an hour— actually just rebottling it from already available sources into tiny state-branded bottles — while denying them any Covid protection in prisons, or even the same hand sanitizer they were bottling. And Cuomo’s greatest political failure occurred because Cuomo literally erased vulnerable people from being counted: his coverup of the deaths of elderly New Yorkers in nursing homes during Covid. Then Cuomo violated ethics laws by assigning two of his speechwriters to write a book portraying him as a hero of the Covid crisis, and he sold the book for his own profit for $5.1 million.
He is entitled. Cuomo, the overprivileged and coddled son of former Governor Mario Cuomo, seems to feel he can help himself to anything. Not just to women’s bodies, but also to anything else, from the money of rich donors to city funds — and in fact he has already racked up two multimillion-dollar campaign finance scandals in only three months. He even helped himself to his own daughter’s rental apartment, which he commandeered as his alleged residence.
He is a bigot. No matter how you try to rationalize it, a man who harasses, bullies and talks down to women is showing bigotry, because in the centers of power, women are an outgroup. And we know for a fact that Cuomo has expressed bigoted statements in the past. (More on that below). New York City is a diverse city. It can, and has put up with leaders who are always eccentric, sometimes corrupt, and inevitably all-around strange. But bigotry has no place in New York’s leadership.
Consider this summary of Cuomo’s downfall in 2021, from The New Yorker. You can see all these factors at play: The vindictiveness, the abuse of the vulnerable, the entitlement:
Sexual harassment was really just one factor in Cuomo’s downfall. The governor spent a decade ruthlessly dominating New York politics. Even as his daily televised pandemic press briefings briefly made him a national Democratic Party star in early 2020, he was covering up the state’s true number of covid-19 nursing-home deaths, ordering state employees to help him produce a triumphant pandemic-response memoir that netted him a multimillion-dollar book contract, and threatening his critics with public humiliation and personal ruin. (“I will destroy you!” Cuomo screamed over the phone at one state lawmaker.) When legislative leaders in Albany turned against him, and started counting votes for a possible impeachment, it was recognition not just that Cuomo was personally a bad actor but that he was, politically, out of control.
Does that sound like someone who can run a HOA meeting, much less a major American city? It absolutely does not. And you could have figured out that Cuomo cannot lead by knowing that Cuomo is a sexual harasser — because sexual harassers cannot lead. They are too weak and too insecure to do a good job.
The voters of New York City seem to recognize that Cuomo is a bad choice for mayor. After an early period as a front-runner based only on name recognition (a powerful factor in politics) Cuomo has since fallen far behind Zohran Mamdani, a young and charismatic New York City assemblyman who has surged to first place in the polls.
Cuomo, obviously spiraling because of Mamdani’s lead, promptly ran Islamophobic, racist campaign flyers (a technique that recalls the contemptible, homophobic ones that a young Andrew Cuomo created for his father’s failed mayoral campaign against Ed Koch: “Vote for Cuomo, not the h*m*).
You may think it’s obvious that a man cannot serve in any position of power in New York City who sexually harassed and assaulted 11 women (that we know of) over only eight years, then retaliated against four of them when they complained. New York voters generally won’t stand for it. President Trump, who has faced allegations of sexual harassment and assault going back decades, had to go to Washington DC to run for office for a reason: He could not build a political career in New York, where he has been disliked for decades.
It is Trump’s success at winning a second term that no doubt emboldened Cuomo to believe that being a misogynistic creep is no bar to political comebacks. Cuomo created such a horrific record of sexual harassment as the governor of New York that the US Department of Justice made a point of mentioning its conclusions about his behavior years after he left office.
Now consider this: While New York’s voters seem set to reject Cuomo, and many of Mamdani’s fellow candidates including Brad Lander and Michael Blake, as well as prominent former candidates like Maya Wiley do as well, the Democratic Party hasn’t gotten the memo.
The party somehow seems insistent on pushing Cuomo’s miserable, joyless candidacy on an unwilling electorate. (Very Cuomo-like behavior.) We have no one to blame for Cuomo’s miserable re-emergence besides the Democratic Party machine itself.
The Democratic Party is backing Cuomo; it’s the only way he could be on the ballot as a candidate. In the past few months, Cuomo has also gained endorsements from former political opponents who demanded that he resign in disgrace. Around 40% of his endorsements have come from these turncoats, according to Politico. It’s clear they’re covering their bases in case Cuomo wins. They shouldn’t disgrace themselves like this; they were right the first time.
Even Politico sounds baffled by Cuomo’s re-emergence and the endorsements he has received from the same Democratic politicians who correctly denounced him as unfit to lead in 2021: “Many of Cuomo’s former detractors have abruptly reversed course without publicly reckoning with his controversy-laden past, leaving little explanation as to why elected officials who once deemed him unfit for public office now want him to run the nation’s largest city.”
To remind the Democratic Party of just how bad Andrew Cuomo is as a candidate, how unfit he is to lead, let’s take a quick look at his worst political failures and attributes. Here’s a list of the reasons that Andrew Cuomo has a damning history of political failure that makes him unfit to be mayor of New York City. As you look over them, consider that they are completely consistent with the traits of a sexual harasser and this litany of Cuomo’s political failures demonstrates why sexual harassers cannot lead.
Andrew Cuomo is bigoted and completely unfit to represent a diverse city
While making a point about derogatory terms used against Italians, Cuomo used the n-word. With the hard “r.” And not as a youthful mistake in a backwards era. In a live radio interview in 2019. 2019.
“They used an expression, that Southern Italians were called, I believe they were saying Southern Italian Sicilians, were called quote on quote, and pardon my language, but I’m just quoting the Times, ‘n***** wops,’ ‘n-word wops,’ as a derogatory comment,” he said.
This is also disqualifying. If Cuomo, a grown man with a political career that goes back to the 1980s, has a filter so faulty that he would not only think the n-word but say it, in a city that has 2 million Black residents, with a current Black mayor, he’s in the wrong place.
Andrew Cuomo is not only NOT a New Yorker, he actively harmed New York as governor.
As for Cuomo’s sudden interest in New York City, he doesn’t even go here. He hasn’t lived in New York City the entire time Mamdani has been alive. He registered to vote in New York City a scant eight months ago, at which point he started squatting in his daughter’s $8,000 a month apartment — after spending years squatting in his in-laws’ home in Westchester:
His sister Maria Cuomo Cole and her husband, fashion designer Kenneth Cole, meanwhile, reportedly also have a spot nearby, according to the New York Post. The couple listed their nearly 12,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion in Purchase for $22 million this past summer. Cuomo was previously registered to vote at that address, where he also reportedly stashed his possessions after he technically became homeless following his resignation as governor
Cuomo’s neighbors speculate the apartment might not be his full-time residence. The place is nice, they say, but maybe not spacious or ritzy enough for the former governor. Door men “really don’t” bring packages or dry cleaning up to resident’s units, one neighbor tells me, adding, “I feel like this is more of a secondary, tertiary address. Maybe he has a girlfriend or somebody who lives there.”
During that time when Cuomo was “homeless,” he spent $9 million of the money in his campaign coffers on lawyers and storage lockers to hold his stuff.
Cuomo serves his donors and ignores voters
You can tell Cuomo has not lived in New York City for decades because he spent years robbing New York of its own taxes so he could do favors for his rich donors upstate. He took $5 million out of the MTA budget— money sorely needed for New York subway repairs — so he could give it instead as a handout for three ski resorts in upstate New York owned by his rich donors because they had a single slow season of business. This was besides Cuomo’s repetitive raids of the MTA’s budgets for other reasons. He treated the MTA like his own political piggy bank instead of an essential resource for millions of commuters.
Streetsblog has a great summary of Cuomo’s record of political failure especially on transportation, showing that Cuomo raided the MTA's coffers over and over again in his time as governor. This entire list is a direct quote from Streetsblog:
In 2011, he teamed up with suburban Republicans to cut regional hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll taxes slated for the MTA — promising to replace the money with state funds that ultimately totaled less than what the tax should have raised.
In 2013 and 2014, he took a combined $70 million from the MTA operating budget to cover the state's agreed-upon portion of the authority's debt. In 2014 he also lowered tolls on the MTA-run Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge as a handout to Staten Island drivers.
In 2015, he took another $121.5 million from transit operations — this time to pay for capital projects, which are supposed to be funded by an entirely separate budget.
In 2016, he ordered the MTA to cut a $4.9-million check to bail out three upstate ski resorts.
In 2019, he spoke out against his own appointed MTA leadership for moving ahead with biennial scheduled fare hikes — giving the MTA the short shrift while lying about his veto power over its budget decisions.
In 2020, he used the Covid-19 crisis to justify a $261 million cut from the MTA's operating budget.”
The corruption. The corruption.
Cuomo’s run for mayor, swaddled as it is in his usual breathtaking levels of arrogance and cynicism, has also violated New York City campaign finance laws. Twice. Already.
Cuomo coordinated with an oligarchical super-PAC called Fix the City. Who’s behind Fix the City? Real estate moguls and other millionaires with business before the city, trying to install a mayor who will pass policies that increase their profits. The City broke down the source of Fix the City’s donors according to their financial interests with the city:
That campaign finance violation that cost Cuomo over $600,000 in matching funds. Maybe Cuomo felt he could afford to give that money up, considering the outside money he was getting from the Super PAC amounted to nearly $11 million.
Then Cuomo violated campaign disclosure laws by not revealing that he has $3 million in stock options in a nuclear startup, whose founder he met at a networking event. The startup has no current business before the city, a Cuomo spokesperson claimed to Bloomberg, but consider that Cuomo has made key decisions in the past about nuclear power, including shutting down a major nuclear plant.
You may be asking “why should I care,” and that’s a great question.
Here’s why: New York City is a major center of national and global finance, and whoever makes the call for how business works here tends to influence policy elsewhere in the country. The mayor of New York City doesn’t technically control Wall Street, or the New York Federal Reserve, or the Southern District of New York office of the Department of Justice, or real estate but….let’s say that previous crises have shown it’s a dotted line; the mayor tends to show up to take some credit, at least. New York City also tends to lead the nation in things like policing styles, which is why former police commissioner Bill Bratton managed to use his department’s abuse of New York minority residents to export his violent, militarized, openly racist “broken windows” policing style to other cities. Even employment law here — paid sick leave, preservation of bonus payments — is closely observed across the country, because so many large corporations are headquartered in the city. Like it or not, New York City can set policy precedents. Bad policy here can take root quickly elsewhere.
Now it’s also true the city’s mayors have frequently been strange, eccentric, verbally aggressive and all-around insufferable.
You get the idea; New Yorkers don’t expect our mayors to be angels. We have carved out a comfortable political home in Gracie Mansion for grandiose weirdos.
But even for New York City, Andrew Cuomo is a step too far.
For context: Rudy Giuliani’s foibles need no introduction. Michael Bloomberg’s responses to most questioning he received ranged from the racist to the misogynistic but was almost always reflexively contemptuous and disrespectful. Bill De Blasio enraged every New Yorker by insisting on taking a full motorcade 11 miles each way every workday on the city’s crowded highways — making him late to most of his morning meetings — so that he could work out at his old run-down YMCA gym in Park Slope. (He also accidentally killed a groundhog. RIP Charlotte.) Eric Adams….well…besides the (now-dropped) corruption charges against him for allegedly taking bribes from Turkey, Eric Adams nearly defies description.
Cuomo is a step too far: He is not just insufferable. He is actively harmful. His history as a failed leader, and as a misogynistic creep who thinks he is entitled to grope the body of every woman around him, makes him unfit to serve as a proverbial dogcatcher, much less a mayor.
Cuomo, and Democrats, have to see now that his political career cannot be revived. It’s a necessary precedent for all sexual harassers who seek positions of power where they can potentially abuse more women. The women of New York City deserve safety and a leader they can trust. Cuomo can’t even be trusted around women, much less in drafting policy to benefit them.
Cuomo is making a mockery of New York City by using it as a stepping stone to gain more power that he will inevitably abuse — as he has abused every bit of power ever given to him — and his candidacy should not just be stopped, it should not exist at all. And the Democratic Party should know that, and stop supporting Cuomo and any other ossified sex creep. We’ve had enough.