![]() ![]() “Black and white, young and old, straight and LGBTQ, powerful people, friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.” The video did not address some of the more serious allegations against Cuomo. Cuomo again denied that he has ever touched anyone inappropriately, and accused the investigators of “politics and bias.” At one point, he referenced photos that appeared on A1 of the New York Times showing him touching a woman’s face and kissing her on the cheek he described the images as “not front-page news,” then displayed a slide deck of pictures showing him similarly kissing other people. Reporters were not given the opportunity to ask questions, but were given plenty to chew on. ICYMI: The eviction moratorium, the child tax credit, and the episodic poverty news cycleĪfter the report dropped, Cuomo responded not with a press conference but with a recorded video statement. Colleagues of the physician recalled that she was “shocked that the governor had made such a comment on national television,” and concerned that it “would take away from the important public health service” she was trying to perform. ![]() “I am compelled to come forward to tell the truth.” A third woman, an unnamed official at the New York State Department of Health, said that Cuomo made sexual comments to her both before and during a press conference in March 2020, at which she gave him a COVID swab for the cameras. An unnamed executive assistant who said that Cuomo groped her, including under her blouse, told investigators that she was prepared to take her experience “to the grave,” only to become visibly distressed in front of colleagues while watching Cuomo claim, at a press conference in early March, that he had never “touched anyone inappropriately.” A second accuser, Virginia Limmiatis, testified that she decided to come forward as “a direct result” of the same press conference: “He is lying again,” she said. Ironically (or perhaps not), the words “press conference” appear thirty-eight times in the report, and are central to some of its most serious revelations. The report found that Cuomo did indeed violate both state and federal law, corroborating the claims of eleven women who said that Cuomo touched them without their consent and/or made lewd remarks. Yesterday, that probe came to a close: the state attorney general’s office published its report on the matter, and it was even more damning than many media observers had expected. As the reporter pressed for an answer, his mic was cut. On a press call in April, a reporter asked Cuomo if he would resign should a probe into the sexual-harassment claims conclude that he broke state law. Journalists who had held Cuomo’s feet to the fire found themselves frozen out. Even though he met in person with journalists at the beginning of the pandemic (and continued to meet in person with supporters), Cuomo transitioned to remote press conferences, citing public-health grounds, with the first preceding his scandals as the allegations piled up, his remote briefings became less and less frequent. Pundits hailed him as authoritative, reassuring, even sexy national networks carried his press conferences live, and they won a special Emmy award for Cuomo’s “masterful use of television to inform and calm people.” Then, early this year, Cuomo experienced a vicious narrative shift-he was accused first of covering up nursing-home deaths in his state, then of bullying, then of sexual harassment- and his media relations became a lot less open. Last year, as the pandemic ravaged his state, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was widely lauded for the way he communicated. Live by the press conference, die by the press conference.
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