Three women have reported in less than a week individual cases of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior by the governor of New York, Democrat Andrew Cuomo. The third testimony, about an “uncomfortable encounter” with the politician at a wedding consisting of an “unsolicited advance”, was known this Monday, just five days after the first complaint, and at the same time that the governor’s office gave light Green to New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate the allegations against her. Some complaints that the also Democrat Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has described as “credible.”
“Can I kiss you?” Cuomo asked Anna Ruch, 33, during a wedding banquet in New York in 2019 that they both attended as guests, according to the newspaper. The New York Times. The governor had put his hand on the small of the woman’s back, and she withdrew it in bewilderment, then grabbed both of his cheeks. It was when he asked if he could kiss her, so loudly that one of Ruch’s friends, who was nearby, heard him and pulled her out of there. The woman has related what happened to the newspaper in an interview this Monday. “I was so confused and dumbfounded and uncomfortable that I was speechless,” she explained. His version has been corroborated by the friend. There is graphic testimony of the moment when Cuomo, 63, grabs her face by the cheeks.
Ruch’s testimony is the third in less than a week against Cuomo, after two former advisers reported being harassed at their workplace. Like a snowball, the harassment stories add to the controversy caused by the concealment of data on the number of deaths from covid-19 in nursing homes in the State, which is being investigated by the FBI and the justice system, and which has on the warpath against the progressive faction of his own party. To try to stop the scandal, Cuomo himself admitted this Sunday that some things said in the past could have been misinterpreted by his victims as flirting. “If I have made someone feel that, I am truly sorry,” he apologized in a statement.
However, the governor has remained silent on Monday, just one year after the first declared case of coronavirus in New York. The management of the pandemic launched him to political stardom in the first wave, last spring, to the point that some considered that such fame was the prelude to his leap into the national political arena. But the proliferation of scandals, from the deaths in the residences to the three alleged cases of harassment, through the resignation of experts from his Administration due to differences in criteria on vaccination, tarnish his career in the short term.
The three cases follow a similar pattern: young women, up to 30 years his junior, before whom he intended to become a mentor, as he himself explained to reject the first of the complaints. Ruch is the only one who did not work for the governor or the state. Charlotte Bennet, the second complainant, referred to her apologies as “regrettable and inappropriate.” “These are not the actions of someone who simply feels misunderstood, but rather those of an individual exercising his power to evade justice.”
Attorney General James said Monday that she received an official letter from the governor’s office giving her team “the authority to advance an independent investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment filed against Governor Cuomo. This is not a responsibility we take lightly, as allegations of sexual harassment must always be taken seriously. ” The conclusions will be made public.
In the same sense that James has expressed Pelosi hours before the third case was known: “The two women must be taken seriously, they deserve to be heard and treated with dignity. The independent investigation must follow due process and respect all those involved ”. A little further has gone the mayor of New York, also a Democrat Bill de Blasio, a declared opponent of Cuomo, stating that the complaints have made him “sick.”
If the accusations turn out to be true, “Cuomo’s behavior would have been disgusting and chilling,” said De Blasio, who underscored the pattern of behavior underlying the harassment: “The thought of a powerful man trying to take advantage of his power, intimidating to a young woman, treating her as if she were his property ”.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/a-third-testimony-of-harassment-narrows-the-siege-on-the-governor-of-new-york/
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