New York Governor Andrew Cuomo refused to resign on Friday, while dozens of elected Democratic officials demand that he resign following a wave of accusations of sexual harassment by women who worked in his office.
“I will not resign,” Cuomo said in a conference call with reporters in the afternoon. Instead, he tried to cast doubt on the women who accused him of harassment.
“I didn’t do what was alleged, period,” he said. “I’m not going to speculate on people’s possible motives, but I can say that, as a former attorney general who has been through this situation many times, there are often many reasons to make a complaint, which is why you need to know the facts before making a decision. “
The teleconference came hours after a flurry of delegations from the New York congress – from progressives like the Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman to competitors like the Reps. Jerry Nadler and Nydia Velazquez – ask Cuomo to step aside in a barrage of press releases. Cuomo, on the conference call, was explicitly after these Democrats.
“Politicians who do not know a single fact, but still form a conclusion and an opinion are, in my opinion, reckless and dangerous,” he said. “People in New York should not trust a politician who takes a position without knowing any facts or substance.”
In the past three weeks, several women have publicly claimed that Cuomo has sexually harassed them, including women who worked with the governor. The most serious denunciation was made this week, by a former official who said the governor had touched her at the Executive Mansion. The allegations prompted a mass of New York Democrats to demand Cuomo’s resignation, including many of the lawmakers he would have to work with this month to form a pandemic-era state budget before the April 1 deadline. New York State Attorney General Letitia James is investigating the allegations.
Cuomo, however, was challenging on Friday, sometimes beyond reasonable belief. On Friday’s call, he compared requests to resign to “cancel the culture”. He suggested that he was not “part of the political club” just a few minutes before acknowledging that he has been in politics since he was 23 and works for his father.
“I never harassed anyone, I never abused anyone, I never attacked anyone and I never would,” said Cuomo. “Now, is it possible that I took a photo with a person who after the fact says he was uncomfortable with the pose of the photo? Yes. And that’s what you’re hearing about.”
Just before he started his call, a former Albany reporter detailed this type of pose and the governor’s behavior while covering him in an essay in New York magazine.
“I never thought that the governor wanted to have sex with me. It wasn’t about sex, ”she wrote. “It was about power. He wanted me to know that I was powerless, that I was small and weak, that I didn’t deserve the relative power that I had: a platform to hold him accountable for his words and actions. He wanted me to do it I know that he could take away my dignity at any time with an inappropriate comment or a hand on my waist. “