Former Cuomo Staffer Warns About His Return to Power

With only a day to go before New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo is in the lead — but many still have questions about his policies and character as a leader. In 2021, 11 women came forward publicly with accusations of Cuomo’s sexual harassment, including lewd language, groping, and kissing in the workplace. Upon investigation, Cuomo was found to have harassed 13 women during his time as governor. Cuomo’s legal defense has cost public taxpayers around $60 million, and his campaign of retribution against those women has not stopped.

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Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development advisor to Cuomo, was the first of those 11 women to speak out. She had to face the full wrath of Cuomo’s political machine. Boylan remains outspoken about the former governor’s sordid history. In a recent interview with us on The Indypendent News Hour, she warned that Cuomo will abuse his power again if he becomes New York City’s mayor.

“Fear is motivating everything around him in his orbit,” she said. “And he is creating that by design.

”This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full interview, click here.

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The Indypendent: To begin, can you elaborate on your role in the Cuomo administration and your proximity to Cuomo and his inner circle?

Lindsey Boylan: I worked for the administration for over three years from 2015 to 2018. I was chief of staff for Empire State Development, overseeing economic development for that agency. In my last year there, I was promoted to deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser to the governor. So I oversaw all of the economic development as well as the housing portfolio of the Department of State. I also oversaw various big projects and interdepartmental work, like the state’s recovery work in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

It was a big job, and it was a lot of work directly with the governor and his senior staff, particularly. I had a lot of respect for the substance of the job that I was doing. It was really interesting and important, and I’d spent a career kind of building up to that point. I’m an urban planner by background, and that work was appealing to me, especially traveling across the state and meeting so many interesting people trying to do good work.

What was the work environment like for women, and how did Andrew Cuomo treat you?

The other half of the job was incredibly depressing and debasing because it was dealing with this person who had absolutely no respect for women, absolutely no respect for anyone. Andrew Cuomo was constantly sexually harassing any woman that he was attracted to.

I would say the most recent investigation findings from Biden’s Department of Justice, that Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women, is a severe undercount. It’s just that no more women are going to come forward after the way that he’s used lawfare to seek retribution against all of us who came forward.

The culture of the place and the abusive work environment, the toxic work environment that is covered in great detail in the New York Attorney General’s report, was soul-crushing. I’m not the only woman who experienced harassment that described it as some of the lowest, lowest moments of our lives. We would go into meetings with the governor never knowing if he was going to ask substantive questions or if he was going to call you by the name of his ex-girlfriend. You had to take it as it came, and if you did anything but kind of go along with that environment, you were penalized on a consistent basis.

Were there any measures taken to protect you or the other women from the harassment?

It was not just how he harassed so many women, but that the people around him, and primarily the women around him, fostered this toxic work environment where we were being fed to this beast, this monster.

I’ve used this metaphor before, but I’m going to use it again because I can’t really think of a better example. When I was growing up, there was a bully on my block, and he had a snake. He would feed the snake mice by slapping the head of the mouse against the glass container where the snake was to disorient the mouse and allow the snake to eat it quickly without the mouse reacting and scurrying around the snake.

That is what it felt like to work under Cuomo, not just because I was being fed to this predator, but because I was being constantly bamboozled. It was hard to tell which way was up and which way was down. You were constantly being subjected to an incredibly toxic environment, and the only way forward was to not react at all when he would sexually harass you or when he would yell at you. You just did not want to make waves and not create a problem for yourself or for him.

So you described some of the conditions of working under someone like Andrew Cuomo. Can you talk about your decision to continue working in the office?

I have experienced sexual harassment in every job I’ve had, starting at age 15 hostessing in restaurants, waitressing as I got into my 20s, and then ultimately culminating in this job. Sexual harassment for women is a fact of the working environment. But never had I experienced something so extreme. Typically, sexual harassment that I experienced would be one individual, a one-off situation — it wasn’t a part of the entire culture, and it wasn’t being perpetuated by the leaders. Even if it was a powerful person, it wasn’t basically in the organizational structure, so to speak. Working for Andrew Cuomo, that was the organizational structure. And you know, week after week of that, month after month of that, and certainly after years of that, it kind of wears at your soul and wears at your sense of identity.

I had worked so hard my whole life to get in this room. I did not come from a political family. I did not come from a wealthy family. I came to New York right after college and started working in urban planning, in and around city politics. I’d always wanted to be in politics, and so there was no better place to be, especially at this time when Trump was in the White House and Andrew Cuomo was an incredibly powerful figure in the Democratic Party.

It was kind of like being elevated to the Olympics and then realizing that your coach and the leader for your team is Larry Nassar. You were this high-performance person but then also expected to deal with harassment and abuse on a consistent basis. It was such a difficult thing to contend with mentally because it was exactly where I had worked so hard to get. So I think that was what made it such a difficult place to work and also such a difficult place to leave. I didn’t want to fail.

Was it only the women in the office who frequently felt this way?

No. Besides the rampant sexual harassment, he had this pattern of basically ruling by fear. Everyone is afraid of this man, and they’re still afraid of him now. People say, “Why are these unions endorsing him?” or “Why are these individuals supporting this?” The biggest reason is fear. There is a fear that he will throw out previous compromising positions or stories that he knows about them or just smear them. Fear is motivating everything around him in his orbit, and he is creating that by design.

What do you think motivates Cuomo to be in politics?

He’s a misanthrope. He does hate people. There was one famous anecdotal story that I was not there for, but I heard about, and it was kind of legendary: he got stuck in a die-in protest, which meant he was laying alongside a bunch of protesters and students and kids, and he was just staring down his staffers like: “I’m gonna kill you.” Like he just hates being around people. He doesn’t answer questions because he is very bad at it, but even if he weren’t, he would still be avoiding people because he really just does not like being around others.

In terms of what motivates him, he’s not a very happy person. People talk so much about how women can be emotional and all of these unfair stereotypes. Supposedly men are these strong figures, but he’s an incredibly emotional person, and for months at a time, he would basically be holed up in the governor’s mansion instead of the Capitol building. His senior staff and secretary would have to bring him work and things because he didn’t want to interact with people directly.

He doesn’t like people, but I think a lot of what motivates him are some issues around his father. He wants to live up to or surpass the legacy of his father, Mario Cuomo. He was one of his father’s earliest campaign managers, and besides going to law school and working on his cars, he hasn’t done anything besides politics. Ever. His few forays into business have been epic failures. This is all he knows how to do, and what Andrew Cuomo knows to do in politics is brute force. He really made his name doing the dirty work for his father. He would reference his father a lot, but in a very complicated way. Of course, every family is complicated, but theirs seemed pretty toxic.

We often hear that a lot of politicians or men in power abuse those close to them, but like we saw with Donald Trump, a lot of people don’t care if they feel that their lives will improve because of their policies or political savvy. What do you think about Andrew Cuomo’s approach to politics and how that would impact New Yorkers?

I wish everyone cared about sexual harassment and abuse of women and workplace-based abuse, but you really don’t need to in order to take away what’s important in terms of understanding this monster. His abuse of women is really an example of his broader abuse of power.

It’s him not telling you the truth — ever. It’s him putting the fear of god into anyone who can tell you the truth, making people fearful to even go against him. So while I wish people cared about what happened to me and other women, there’s just the fact that he’s used more than $60 million in taxpayer money to fight these lawsuits, as well as nursing home families’ lawsuits. He’s abusing everyone and everything that he has at hand just to silence anyone who would tell the truth about him. And if he’s put in the mayor’s position, he will do the very same thing.

The people endorsing him are, in many cases, people who have benefited from his personal political patronage or intend to. Now they’re saying so openly. The District 9 Council of Carpenters has said that its early endorsement might equal various political benefits from him for supporting him early on. It’s disgusting. And, at the end of the day, the people who are hurt by that are the people of New York. So every time I talk about my own experience, I’m a proxy for so many more people who have been on the receiving end of this abuse. And it’s not just sexual harassment. It is this man figuring out any way that he can to abuse power to his own benefit.

What do you think about his COVID-19 response, which has been shrouded in controversy?

He forced COVID-positive nursing home patients back into those nursing homes when there were other options available, leading to an incredibly large number of deaths —15,000. He tried to hide those numbers and had his people — directly or indirectly — change the numbers in various reports. Many people died as a direct result of his policies. At the same time, he prevented Bill de Blasio from putting the city of New York into lockdown when it actually would have prevented significant community spread. He made it impossible for Bill de Blasio to open Citi Field as a mass vaccination site until he could take credit for it. It was all about him. And while he was doing all of this and actually creating terrible policy that had a deadly impact and lying about it, he was also using government staff time to help him write a self-aggrandizing book, rewriting the history of his successes during this COVID period, and getting $5 million for it.

What political strategy are you encouraging New Yorkers to pursue this election season?

This is only our second ranked-choice voting election in the city of New York, and that produces very different incentives for how we approach the primary. That means it’s not a winner-take-all strategy. What I am saying is: Do not rank Cuomo anywhere on your one through five list of rankings. He cannot appear anywhere there because he will have a percentage of the votes on his name recognition alone.

I am suggesting people fill out that ballot with five good apples for mayor that they can live with and that they can be proud of. I have donated to these five people and I will be ranking them, in no particular order at this point: Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, Adrienne Adams and Jessica Ramos. These are all elected officials who have integrity, who have experience, and who have ethics.

As we get closer to the election, my strategy is to coordinate with all kinds of folks in the city — people who are fighting on issues around housing, street safety, transportation, around all of these issues. Rank these five people in the order that you feel is most compelling, and make sure you don’t rank Andrew Cuomo. Eric Adams is our mayor because a bunch of people ranked him even at the lower level, and he didn’t win until one of the much later rounds, until he got to 50%. Cuomo is infinitely beatable, but we have to use all five of our votes.

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