A former aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo described how he saw her at a lobbying event, “grabbed her in a kind of dance pose” and then hired her for his office, where he went on to “verbally and mentally abuse” hers, she told New York Magazine, recalling how he criticized his clothes and once threatened to “end” his career by not transferring a call.
The former official, identified only as Kaitlin, spoke to New York for an article published on Friday, when dozens of Democratic lawmakers at state and federal levels asked Cuomo to step down on charges of sexual harassment by six women and the scandal still growing. on the management of coronavirus in nursing homes by its administration.
Kaitlin met Cuomo in 2016, while working at a lobbying company that organized an event for the governor, she told New York.
On the way out, Cuomo stopped to introduce himself to the event workers, including Kaitlin.
The governor recognized Kaitlin from a previous position she held with a Democratic politician and said she would soon be back in government, working at the state level, she said.
“So he grabbed me in a kind of dance pose,” she recalled, as a photographer took pictures. “I was thinking, ‘This is the strangest interaction I’ve ever had in my life … Don’t touch me.'”
Within a week, Kaitlin received a call from the governor’s office asking for a job interview, although she never gave her contact information to anyone in the Cuomo circle, she said.
“We all knew it was just because of how I looked,” Kaitlin told New York. “Why else would you ask someone to come two days after you have a two-minute interaction at a party?”
Although Kaitlin took the job regardless of her career, she soon regretted it, she told New York.
She often had to run out of the shower in the morning to meet Cuomo in her office in Midtown Manhattan, simply because he decided to leave for work early, she recalled.
Then, when she managed to get there in time, Cuomo questioned why she didn’t look tidy.
“’Did you decide not to get ready today?’”, She remembers asking. “Or, ‘Didn’t you put on makeup today?'”
Kaitlin added that she was constantly under pressure to wear designer clothes and high heels to meet the governor’s expectations, a goal she found difficult to meet with her salary.
The job itself was also humiliating, with Cuomo losing his cool regularly when she was unable to transfer a call using the clumsy touch keyboard, Kaitlin said.
“You can’t find the fucking phones – I’m going to end your career,” she recalled that she once threatened her.
When Kaitlin offered Cuomo his cell number on a different day, she remembered, the governor acted as if she was approaching him.
“I thought it would be normal to offer it to your boss,” she said.
At a Super Bowl party, not long after she started working for Cuomo, the governor struck up a conversation with a young woman, who was from the public, with a dove tattooed on her hand, Kaitlin said.
At an office meeting the next morning, Cuomo instructed his aides to find the tattooed woman and potentially hire her for the government team, Kaitlin said – giving her a scary flashback to how she was hired.
Although she remembers Cuomo asking questions about her love life, as some of Cuomo’s accusers claimed, Kaitlin said she was not sure if any of her experiences constituted sexual harassment in the workplace – like five other current employees or former employees of Cuomo claimed – she said that she nevertheless felt that her time as governor was hell.
She told New York that she felt “verbally and mentally abused by him and his team” and considered the work environment “a form of coercive control”.
Cuomo’s office declined to comment to The Post on the general New York article.
A spokesman for Cuomo told New York: “There is, and never has been, the expectation of wearing certain clothes or high heels.”
Additional reporting by Bernadette Hogan