Four years ago, no one, not even Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, disputed that he liked to hug his staff, or that he would sometimes use terms of endearment, such as “honey,” when addressing the women among them, a habit he acknowledged was outdated.
When a member of his security detail said he had touched her in a sexualized manner, he claimed to have no memory of it and denied any sexual intent, but added, “If she said I did it, I believe her.”
And when the weight of roughly a dozen sexual harassment complaints helped force his resignation, he acknowledged the women “who I truly offended.”
“For that, I deeply, deeply apologize,” he said in his resignation speech.
Mr. Cuomo, now the front-runner in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, no longer seems to be as sorry.
As Mr. Cuomo charted a path toward resurrecting his political career, he began challenging the accusations more aggressively. He suggested in interviews and in speeches that he was a victim of “cancel culture,” and said that if he were guilty of anything, it was being “old-fashioned and out of touch” with today’s norms.
He filed an ethics complaint and a lawsuit against the state attorney general, whose investigators had found that he “sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees” and “created a hostile work environment for women.”
He began a legal action for defamation against one of his accusers, Charlotte Bennett, days after she dropped her federal lawsuit against him. She cited a desire to avoid further “abusive filings and invasive subpoenas” that were “meant to humiliate and retaliate against me.”
One of his sisters, Madeline Cuomo, quietly steered a group of women targeting her brother’s accusers on social media, and told them she was doing so at Mr. Cuomo’s behest (an assertion both she and her brother denied).
Where he once expressed respect for some of the employees who said he had harassed them, he has since sought to portray them as dubious political actors motivated by greed and a desire to destroy him.
Now, in Mr. Cuomo’s telling, everyone has it backward: He is the victim.
His changed posture, he argues, simply reflects a better understanding of his accusers and their motives, and of what he says was a flawed, politically motivated report by the attorney general.
“I know it’s not true now,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
His defiant stance seems to resonate with many New Yorkers. With the June 24 mayoral primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations are little more than background noise on the campaign trail, one element in a decades-long governmental record that includes both accomplishments and serious questions about his ethics, honesty and handling of nursing home residents during the Covid pandemic.
A recent Marist poll of likely Democratic primary voters had Mr. Cuomo leading by double digits among both women and people who identify as liberal. Many who called for his resignation as governor now support his mayoral bid. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who describes herself as a champion of women, has suggested that Mr. Cuomo might deserve a second chance.
Over the course of the scandal that precipitated his demise, women accused Mr. Cuomo of giving them unwanted kisses and hugs, grabbing their buttocks, commenting on their appearances and fondling their breasts.
The willingness of some to overlook the allegations may point to the cresting of the #MeToo era and the backlash against “wokeness” that arguably helped re-elect Donald Trump as president last year, despite his having been found liable for sexual abuse. It also may reflect a dearth of attractive candidates for centrist Democrats whose concerns over the city’s direction helped propel Eric Adams into office.
“I’m disheartened by the fact that the powers that be, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans or influential voices, that they’re shrugging at this whole situation,” said Ana Liss, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo who spoke up in 2021 because she found the former governor’s treatment of her demeaning and wanted to support other women with more egregious complaints.
She questioned whether New Yorkers had the bandwidth or energy to care if “Andrew Cuomo is creepy with young women,” now that Mr. Trump was “flooding the zone with apocalyptic new developments every day.” And she lamented that “this whole toxic strongman political ecosystem” would most likely “continue to persist.”
Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller now running for mayor, offered another theory for many voters’ apparent apathy about what once seemed like a seismic political event: “pandemic memory repression.”
The evolution of Mr. Cuomo’s stance may, as he has said, stem from an honest belief in his own innocence. His earlier remarks might also have reflected a belief that in order to keep his job, he needed to express at least some remorse — something that his advisers urged him to do.
“He is not sounding contrite so let’s get back to that,” his former longtime pollster, Jefrey Pollock, wrote in a group chat among senior aides as Mr. Cuomo, then still governor, held a news conference in 2021. The chat was cited in the attorney general’s report.
Lindsey Boylan, the first of Mr. Cuomo’s staff members to go public with complaints that he had harassed her, said that whatever gestures he made toward contrition, including his resignation, were motivated by politics. “He knew that it was the way to salvage his future,” she said.
Mr. Cuomo rarely makes himself available to reporters, but when he does face questions about the allegations, he brushes them off as curious relics from the overheated peak of the #MeToo era.
During a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Cuomo said his resignation reflected his desire to avoid creating a “distraction to government functionality, that they would all be involved in impeachment proceedings, blah, blah, blah,” a decision he now regrets. (Mr. Cuomo was referring to the Legislature’s pending impeachment inquiry, which could have barred him from running for state office again.)
He casts aside critical reports from the New York State Assembly, which found “overwhelming evidence that the former governor engaged in sexual harassment,” and the Department of Justice, which echoed that assessment. He suggests that the investigations were largely based on incorrect findings from the state attorney general.
Yet Mr. Cuomo’s casual dismissal of the claims represents a striking contrast to the ferocity of his late-tenure and post-resignation legal strategy, one fueled by more than $25 million in state funds.
Victims’ advocates say Mr. Cuomo seems to be following a well-worn playbook deployed by men accused of sexual misconduct, which is known as DARVO: “deny, attack and reverse victim and offender.”
He filed a complaint against the attorney general, Letitia James, accusing her of professional misconduct, and sued her office for refusing to release more of her investigative material. (The lawsuit has been dismissed, as has the ethics complaint, her office said).
His team, in accusing Ms. James of being politically motivated, frequently points out that she mounted a brief run for governor after her report helped force his resignation.
“The former governor bears responsibility for his own actions,” a spokesman for Ms. James said. “We stand behind this investigation and its findings.”
During litigation with Ms. Bennett, Mr. Cuomo sought her medical records, including those from her gynecologist, something his team said was a routine request from a prescribing doctor, even though her complaint involved no allegations of forcible touching.
Nearly four years after he said Ms. Bennett had “every right to speak out,” he moved to sue her, an act that victims’ lawyers said seemed designed to muzzle her while he runs for mayor. More than five months later, he has yet to file an actual complaint.
His lawyers sought to make public the full name of one of his accusers, whom investigators referred to only as Kaitlin, during a legal battle involving another. They also asked for three and a half years’ worth of Kaitlin’s phone records.
Mr. Cuomo’s surrogates argued in a recent interview that it was only fair to publicize her full name, so that people who knew her could come forward with relevant information.
The “insistence on exposing Kaitlin’s identity was obviously retaliatory,” her lawyers wrote in a court filing.
And he has sought, above all, to make clear that despite the volume and consistency of the allegations, the people arrayed against him — the attorney general, her investigators, the complainants — are all political actors with axes to grind.
“Governor Cuomo’s political opponents and those eyeing the governorship and 2022 Democratic primary, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, seized the opportunity to mortally wound the popular governor who was running for a fourth term,” his lawyers wrote in 2022.
Complaints about Mr. Cuomo’s behavior extended beyond the circle of women who worked for him.
“If you have enough money, you can create your own reality,” said Stephanie Miner, the former mayor of Syracuse, who said Mr. Cuomo kissed her against her will at public events, which she saw as his attempt to assert dominance over her. “He doesn’t have to answer to people; he can refuse interviews and debates.”
Even when Mr. Cuomo was still in office, and expressing some contrition, it was clear he had other tactics in mind.
His team immediately attacked the credibility of his first accuser, Ms. Boylan, and released unflattering personnel records to reporters.
After Mr. Cuomo left office, his allies highlighted Ms. Bennett’s time in college, when she and other students accused a classmate of sexual misconduct and the classmate was ultimately expelled.
The accused student sued the school, denouncing its disciplinary process and describing the other students’s complaints as “false.” The case was ultimately settled.
Karen Hinton, a former consultant to Mr. Cuomo who has known him for decades, said she had never known him to take responsibility for his misbehavior.
In 2021, she detailed a decades-old episode during which she said an aroused Mr. Cuomo held her in an intimate hug. Mr. Cuomo denied the encounter, adding that it would have been “virtually impossible.”
More than a decade later, she would go on to work for one of his former friends turned chief antagonist, Bill de Blasio, who as mayor of New York City publicly decried Mr. Cuomo’s vengeful tactics.
“There’s always been this pattern of, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,’” she said. “We just need to make clear that we can’t treat girls and women that way.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
Alyce McFadden is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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