Schneiderman Accusers Told To Keep Quiet Since Going Public Would Hurt Democrats
Some of the women who said they were abused by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman claim they were pressured not to come forward by friends because the prominent Democrat had “the power to do too much good for the Democratic Party,” journalist Ronan Farrow told CNN on Tuesday.
Along with Jane Mayer, Farrow wrote the bombshell New Yorker piece which, after being published Monday evening, forced Schneiderman to resign within hours.
In the piece, Schneiderman is painted as an out-of-control abuser of women who engaged in non-consensual rough sex with his partners, as well as an alcoholic pill-abuser who would often turn violent when under the influence. Two of his ex-girlfriends also claim Schneiderman threatened to harm them or tap their phones if they ever left him.
That was enough to make anyone wary about bringing Schneiderman’s behavior to light. As it turns out, however, Farrow said some of these women’s closest acquaintances told them not to do it due to the fact that Schneiderman was such a prominent leader of #TheResistance.
“A lot of their friends and loved ones said, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t speak out against him,'” Farrow told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota. “And in some cases, that was because they feared the risk of reprisals. They feared him threatening people — using his office and power to say he could wiretap people or he could come after people.”
“But also in some cases, Alisyn, those friends warned them off of talking because they thought that he had the power to do too much good for the Democratic Party,” Farrow noted.
“I mean, that — that’s a story in itself,” Camerota responded.
No one party, I suppose, holds a monopoly on moral hypocrisy when it comes to policing the activities of their own members. However, in the firmament of bizarre and reprehensible behavior, what Farrow and Mayer described has to be considered some sort of a sick record.
In a few thousand words, Schneiderman comes across as a pretty despicable character. He allegedly hit one girlfriend so hard he perforated her eardrum. Another former girlfriend of Sri Lankan descent claims “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was ‘his property.’”
Schneiderman is allegedly an alcoholic of grotesque proportions, with one ex-girlfriend describing how he would “get absolutely plastered five nights out of seven” to the point where he once “literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down, like a tree falling.” That same woman said he regularly abused her prescription tranquilizers.
Did nobody know about this? Did nobody ever see him in this pitiful state?
Former New York state Sen. George Maziarz, a Republican who was targeted by Schneiderman’s office last year, claims he “knew the Manhattan Democrat as a man with a violent temper who often used his public office as a vehicle for retribution,” according to State of Politics.
President Trump tweeted in 2013 about how Schneiderman was in the same league as disgraced politicians Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer, both Democrats who left office after sex scandals. Either Trump tweets so much that it was the proverbial blind squirrel randomly finding the nut or he knew what people refused to say in public about the former attorney general.
In a sense, the Democrats have dodged a bullet. Schneiderman was considered such a lock for higher office that many joked AG stood for “aspiring governor.” Now, he could find himself dealing with the other side of the legal system. Still, even at the end, many people apparently tried to persuade his victims not to come forward, believing he’d done so much good for the party that he was unassailable.
Given that Schneiderman’s legal battle against President Trump had already established him as a superstar among the left, he was arguably considered, next to Robert Mueller, their best hope to dig up something that would force Trump from office.
In the end, however, the only office-less one was Schneiderman, the messianic self-mythologizer who fooled so many Democrats into putting their trust in an alleged serial abuser.
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