New Yorkers Completely Turn on Cuomo, Majority Want Him Not Only out of Office, but Under Criminal Investigation as Well
It’s not just time for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to walk the plank, but to do the perp walk as well, according to a new poll.
Seventy percent of New Yorkers think Cuomo should resign, according to a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York State released Friday.
The results show the impact of the report issued Tuesday by New York State Attorney General’s Letitia James that said Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women, one of whom has now filed a criminal complaint against the governor.
A Quinnipiac survey from March, when the growing accusations against Cuomo were swirling about, found that 49 percent of registered voters said Cuomo should stay in office.
The poll released Friday also found that 55 percent of those surveyed believe Cuomo should be charged with a crime.
If Cuomo does not leave on his own, 63 percent of those surveyed want him given a shove by state lawmakers through the impeachment process.
The poll had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
As the report is mined by the media, The Washington Post noted that on August 12, 2019, Cuomo signed a law making it easier for women to file sexual harassment claims in the workplace.
“The next day, according to a state investigation, he asked a female state trooper driving him to an event, ‘Why don’t you wear a dress?'” the Post reported.
That led the Post to declaim about the seemingly Jekyll-Hyde character revealed by the report.
“The gaping disparity between Cuomo’s publicly declared commitment to stamping out abuse and harassment and his alleged private behavior has emerged as one of the most staggering aspects of a scandal that seems on track to lead to an early end to his governorship. An examination of the report’s findings compared with Cuomo’s contemporaneous public statements reveals a leader who appeared completely to detach his personal behavior from his public persona,” the Post wrote.
“There is a very twisted view, a very twisted psychology with men like Cuomo, who think they are helping women,” Debra Katz, a lawyer who represents Cuomo accuser Charlotte Bennett, told the Post.
“He passes the most far-reaching legislation in the United States protecting women from sexual harassment, but the way he comported himself behind closed doors in the workplace is classic sexual harassment.”
Maria T. Vullo, who formerly led the New York state Department of Financial Services told the Post she feels “extremely disappointed and angry, because we believed in what he was trying to do.”
“I felt he was committed to the women’s equality agenda. We put together a 10-point plan. We did sexual harassment reforms. I thought he was really serious about that. And now he sexually harasses all these women and claims it isn’t so?” she said.
Steve Villano, a member of the press office for former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo — the three-term New York governor who was the father of Andrew Cuomo — castigated the current governor in a commentary published Saturday by the Albany Times-Union.
Noting that Andrew Cuomo had hired him 37 years ago to work for the elder Cuomor, Villano wrote that he is “pained that his mother, Matilda Cuomo, nearing 90 years old, has to see her oldest son sully the family’s good name.”
“I am filled with outrage for the scars Andrew Cuomo afflicted on the 11 brave women who stepped forward, under oath, to testify to his unwanted touching, his untethered teenage testosterone with which he tormented them, and their fear of losing their public service jobs if they spoke up,” he wrote.
“I thought I knew from experience how arrogant and insensitive Andrew Cuomo could be, but I never took him for being so misogynistic, or politically dumb,” he wrote.
Villano responded to Cuomo’s response to the report with anger.
“When he lamely claimed that he was so affectionate because of his ‘generational and cultural perspectives,’ as an older Italian-American male, I went ballistic. He was gaslighting the public on the ‘toxic’ workplace culture he alone created, blaming it instead on his own Italian-American culture. No, Andrew, our loving, humanitarian Italian-American culture didn’t make you do it. You did. And it is despicable,” Villano wrote.
Villano called on Cuomo to resign and donate the millions he got from his book to fighting sexual harassment.
“If he doesn’t act for something bigger than himself, Cuomo will finally prove what he’s been struggling to show for his entire lifetime: He is not his father,” Villano wrote.
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