A fourth and fifth woman have come forward alleging they were sexually harassed by Governor Andrew Cuomo; one said she was harassed between 2013 and 2015 when she worked in his Albany office, and another woman said the sexual advances occurred in 2000 when Cuomo oversaw the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Ana Liss, who is now 35 years old, told the Wall Street Journal that when she worked in Cuomo’s executive chambers between 2013 and 2015, Cuomo asked her if she had a boyfriend, called her sweetheart, touched her lower back, and kissed her hand.
The fifth woman, Karen Hinton, who worked as a press secretary at HUD under Cuomo, told the Washington Post she was summoned to a dimly lit hotel room in 2000 after a work event, where Cuomo pulled her in for a long, uncomfortable embrace.
Peter Ajemian, a spokesperson for Cuomo’s office, dismissed Hinton’s account calling her a “known antagonist of the governor’s.” They didn’t specifically refute Liss’s account of being hugged and kissed by Cuomo, who then allegedly put his arm around her waist for a photograph at a reception in the governor’s mansion, but said the governor regularly kisses “men and women posing for pictures...That's what people in politics do."
Liss and Hinton are the latest to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate sexual advances. Two former gubernatorial aides, Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett, have made similar allegations, with Boylan saying the governor forcibly kissed her in his office while Bennett said she believed he was grooming her with personal questions. A fifth woman, Anna Ruch, said Cuomo grabbed her face and kissed her cheek at a wedding in 2019.
Cuomo had halted his regular press briefings for seven days as the women came forward. He reappeared Wednesday, apologizing for making people feel uncomfortable, but insisting he’d never touched anyone inappropriately.
“You can go find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people, men, women. It is my usual and customary way of greeting,” he said.
Bennett criticized Cuomo’s claim that this was an apology. “An apology sounds like—‘Charlotte Bennett, I am sorry for sexually harassing you. It was inappropriate and wrong,’” she said in a CBS News interview.
The Washington Post said that Hinton told a reporter about the incident on February 14th, before Boylan and Bennett came forward, but was not ready to discuss the matter publicly. She described the 2000 embrace from the governor as “too long, too tight, too intimate.”
“I thought at that moment it could lead to a kiss, it could lead to other things, so I just pull away again, and I leave,” she recounted to the Post.
Hinton, who has also worked as a press secretary for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently penned an op-ed for the Daily News describing the toxic behavior of male politicians like her two former bosses. When asked why she came forward, Hinton said to Gothamist/WNYC, "Old history but I wanted to help those two women—Lindsey and Charlotte—and showing the pattern over time was important.”
The mounting allegations of sexual harassment cap off a tumultuous few weeks for Cuomo, who faces dueling scandals: sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women and revelations that his top aides deliberately meddled with a health department report to deflate the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes. With political pressure building, state lawmakers voted on Friday to claw back some of the emergency powers he’d been granted at the start of the pandemic.
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins had said on Thursday night that if “any further people [come] forward, I would think it would be time for him to resign.”
A much more cautious statement came from Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie on Friday, a day after Bennett’s CBS News interview. “The Speaker is keenly aware of and paying close attention to the ongoing investigations and developments regarding the two serious and concerning allegations against the Governor,” Heastie’s spokesman Michael Whyland said.
Stewart-Cousins and Heastie didn't immediately return requests for further comment.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is overseeing the investigation into the sexual harassment allegations and sent Cuomo’s office a request to preserve documents, an indication the probe is underway. Federal investigators are reportedly probing his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.
With additional reporting by Brigid Bergin
