The independent probe into New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo found that he sexually harassed multiple women, both in and out of state government.
Investigators focused on the allegations of 11 women, detailed in a blistering 165-page report released Tuesday by the state attorney general’s office.
While sexual misconduct claims from seven women have previously been made public, the report includes shocking new details, including how Cuomo allegedly harassed a state trooper who served on his security detail.
Cuomo, 63, pushed back on the report, saying he “never touched anyone inappropriately.”
Here’s a look at the women behind the sexual harassment allegations highlighted in the AG report:
Lindsey Boylan
Boylan, 36, was the first former Cuomo aide to come forward last year, writing in an essay on Medium that the governor had harassed her multiple times between 2016 and 2018, when she worked as a state economic development official.
Among her allegations was that Cuomo kissed her on the lips without warning inside his Manhattan office in 2018, and that he once suggested the two play strip poker on a state plane.
Investigators said they were able to corroborate those claims and others, including that the gov “touched her on various parts of her body, including her waist, legs, and back.”
The report also found that Cuomo and the Executive Chamber “actively engaged in an effort to discredit” Boylan after she went public in December 2020.
She declined to comment Tuesday.
Charlotte Bennett
Bennett, a 25-year-old former aide to Cuomo, told The New York Times in February that the governor asked her inappropriate personal questions, told her he was open to relationships with women in their 20s, and left her feeling that he “wanted to sleep with me.”
Bennett, who is in her mid-20s, worked as an executive assistant and health-policy adviser. She said most of the interactions took place in June 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak flared up — and around the time she told the governor she was a survivor of sexual assault.
The report found that Cuomo also told her that he was “lonely” because ex-girlfriend Sandra Lee “wasn’t talking to him” and that he wanted to “get on his motorcycle and ride into the mountains with a woman.”
Notes from Bennett’s interviews with investigators detail how Cuomo apparently asked her to find him a girlfriend and how she “deflected” him by suggesting comedian Chelsea Handler or actress Jada Pinkett Smith.
His response: “Jada is married and Chelsea is nuts,” according to the notes.
The 63-year-old divorced governor also apparently told Bennett that he would be willing to date any woman over 22. At that point in their conversation, Bennett told investigators, she felt like Cuomo was “grooming” her and became uneasy.
She said the governor must have known her age because they had discussed she was 25 — and she played soccer against his daughters growing up.
Cuomo was also recorded crooning several lines of the 1960s love song “Do You Love Me?” by the Contours to Bennett during a 2019 phone call.
He once asked her to do pushups in front of him in his office, too, and she dropped and gave him 20.
She reported Cuomo’s behavior to his chief of staff and was moved to a new position, according to the report, which found that senior aides “sought to implement a practice whereby individual staff members who were women were not to be left alone with the Governor.”
After the AG’s findings were released, Bennett again called on Cuomo to resign.
“The Governor’s actions have deprived New Yorkers of the professionalism, passion, and dedication to their state that Charlotte and the many others who refused to submit to his advances have to offer,” her lawyer, Debra Katz, said in a statement.
Ana Liss
Liss, 35, a policy and operations aide who worked for the governor from 2013 to 2015, said he’d behaved inappropriately while on the job in Albany.
Cuomo called her “sweetheart,” asked if she had a boyfriend, touched her lower back and kissed her hand, Liss said in interviews.
Her allegations were supported by the report, and she also told investigators that the governor occasionally kissed her cheeks.
She didn’t complain about the incidents while working for Cuomo, even though they made her uncomfortable, “because saying no could result in being ostracized or fired,” the investigators wrote.
Liss didn’t immediately return a request for comment Tuesday.
Alyssa McGrath
McGrath, 35, became the first current aide to speak out about sexual harassment in the governor’s office, telling the Times in March that Cuomo looked down her shirt, quizzed her about her marital status and told her she was beautiful.
She also recalled how Cuomo smooched her on the forehead and gripped her firmly around the sides while posing for a photo at a 2019 office Christmas party.
“Even though it was strange and uncomfortable and technically not permissible in a typical workplace environment, I was in this mindset that it was the twilight zone and … the typical rules did not apply,” McGrath told investigators.
Her attorney, Mariann Wang, said Tuesday that McGrath and another accuser she represents, Virginia Limmiatis, “feel profoundly grateful to the AG’s team for taking this seriously and examining their reports thoroughly and carefully.”
“Cuomo’s misogyny and abuse cannot be denied. He has been doing this for years, without any repercussions,” the statement said. “He should not be in charge of our government and should not be in any position of power over anyone else.”
Executive Assistant #1
A current Cuomo aide who hasn’t been publicly identified has accused the governor of groping her breast in the Executive Mansion last year.
In an interview with the Times Union of Albany, the woman, who is in her 30s, said she was summoned to the mansion to help Cuomo with his cell phone on a weekday in November.
According to the AG’s report, Cuomo “slid his hand up her blouse, and grabbed her breast, ‘cupp[ing her] breast’ over her bra.”
“I mean it was—he was like cupping my breast,” she told the investigators, the report said. “He cupped my breast. I have to tell you it was—at the moment I was in such shock.”
During one incident, Cuomo asked her to snap selfies as the two worked together inside his office at the Executive Mansion on Dec. 31, 2019, the report said.
As she held up the camera, Cuomo “moved his hand to grab her butt cheek and began to rub it” for at least 5 seconds, the report alleges.
The assistant “was shaking so much during this interaction” that the photos came out blurry — and Cuomo suggested the two sit down to take one more, the document says.
That photo, showing Cuomo smirking while he sits back on a couch with the aide, is included in the report.
The governor then allegedly told her to send the snap to another aide and said “not to share the photograph with anyone else.”
The woman said she didn’t report what happened because she was terrified.
“[T]he way he was so firm with [me] that I couldn’t show anyone else that photo, I was just terrified that if I shared what was going on that it would somehow get around,” she told investigators.
The woman said she became emotional when she saw Cuomo claim at a March press conference that he had never “touched anyone inappropriately” and confided her experience to colleagues, who then reported the groping allegations.
Trooper #1
The report details for the first time allegations that Cuomo, on multiple occasions, sexually harassed an unnamed female state trooper who was assigned to his protective detail in 2017.
It said the governor ran his hand or fingers across her stomach and her back, kissed her on the cheek, asked for her help in finding a girlfriend and asked why she didn’t wear a dress.
In an interview with investigators, Cuomo admitted that he may have kissed the trooper at an event but denied touching her.
The State Troopers Police Benevolent Association said in a statement Tuesday that it was “dismayed and disturbed” by the findings.
“I’m outraged and disgusted that one of my members, who was tasked with guarding the governor and ensuring his safety, could not enjoy the same sense of security in her work environment that he was provided,” PBA President Tom Mungeer said in a statement.
Virginia Limmiatis
Limmiatis, an employee at an energy company, accused Cuomo of touching her chest during a conservation event in upstate New York in May 2017.
She came forward to investigators after she heard the governor’s March statements that he had never “touched anyone inappropriately,” the report states.
“I didn’t know how to report what he did to me at the time and was burdened by shame, but not coming forward now would make me complicit in his lie, and I won’t do it,” she told investigatiors.
State Entity Employee #1
A woman identified only as “State Entity Employee #1” in the report said that Cuomo groped her butt while posing with her for a photo at a September 2019 event in New York City.
She said she was “shocked” and told several family and friends about the incident at the time.
State Entity Employee #2
The report also includes allegations from another staffer of a state-affiliated entity, who is a doctor and a former director at the state Health Department.
The woman, named as “State Entity Employee #2” in the report, said that Cuomo made a sexually-suggestive joke to her in March 2020, right before she was to him a nasal swab during a coronavirus-related news conference.
Then, in front of the press and cameras, he told her, “nice to see you, Doctor — you make that gown look good.”
She said she found his comments offensive, adding “that they would not have been made to an accomplished physician who was a man.”
Kaitlin
Investigators also discussed allegations first made in New York Magazine in March by a woman named Kaitlin, whose last name was not released.
She said the governor hired her in 2016 after the two met at a fundraiser.
During the year that she worked at the governor’s office, Kaitlin said Cuomo made her uncomfortable, including by commenting on her appearance multiple times.
She later moved on to work at a state agency, but would become “visibly distressed” whenever she had to return to the Executive Chamber’s offices for work, the report said.
Anna Ruch
The report details the allegations of Ruch, who came forward in March to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate sexual behavior, saying he grabbed and kissed her at a 2019 wedding.
Ruch, 33, told the New York Times that the governor made unwanted advances toward her and planted an unsolicited kiss on her cheek at the reception in Manhattan.
Karen Hinton
The report doesn’t delve into Hinton’s allegations, though investigators do say they interviewed her regarding her claims, including that Cuomo once gave her an overly long and intimate hug in a hotel in December 2000.
Hinton, a former press aide to Cuomo when he served as the federal housing secretary under President Bill Clinton, told The Washington Post about the alleged incident in March.
The governor has said that her account was “not true.”
