After release of the report by outside counsel prepared under the auspices of New York Attorney General Letitia James, there was a near-universal call for Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign. From President Biden, irony aside, to the New York Times, irony aside, to people in his own office, irony aside, the report sealed the deal.
It was, to be sure, a serious and devastating report. While much of it was the usual empty “inappropriate” stuff, the normative rhetoric that Cuomo said things that people found unpleasant or creepy, at least after the fact. There was also some actual claims about touching breasts and buttocks, and some really other touching that was just weird and creepy.
This isn’t to say that, if true, the things Cuomo said weren’t “inappropriate,” or that it wasn’t “harassment,” both words with such vague meanings as to be true if you want them to. And to be fair, some of the accusations, if true, were very inappropriate as far as I’m concerned. Inappropriate, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and Cuomo’s a pig if he spoke to young women the way they say he did.
Cuomo released a video denying any wrongdoing.
“I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” he said. “I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is just not who I am, and that’s not who I have ever been.”
He’s a kidder. He’s a toucher, something President Biden should be able to relate to. He tries to personally connect with people by asking them explicit sexual questions. He’s also a former cabinet secretary and the three-term governor, yet none of this surfaced until a few months ago, and once Lindsay Boylan went public with her accusations against Cuomo, others came out of the woodwork. That’s how it tends to happen, with a pile-on of claims. It doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, but bulking up numbers doesn’t mean it did.
For Andrew Cuomo, the significant at the moment is whether he should resign as governor, whether he should be impeached or whether there will be pointing and yelling to be forgotten after the next crisis occurs that compels all eyes to look elsewhere. These are political questions. It’s possible there will be legal actions in the future, but for the moment, it’s a matter of whether Cuomo should stay in office and can function given the report. It no longer matters that he was the Great Hero of the pandemic for a few minutes. He’s now the sexual harasser, and an official report says so.
From the report, for which investigators interviewed 179 witnesses and gathered more than 74,000 pieces of evidence, two things are clear. First, Mr. Cuomo may yet face legal consequences for his alleged actions, which include a yearslong pattern of “unwelcome and nonconsensual touching,” “offensive comments” and other improper behavior toward at least 11 women, several on his staff.
Second, regardless of what may happen in a court of law, the governor has only one conscionable option left: He should resign.
While it’s unclear what makes an option “conscionable,” what appears clear is that Cuomo is now a political pariah without any support. Can he still effectively govern? Can he weather the storm? Does he have any political allies left to stave off impeachment? Probably not. Sure, Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor who get caught in a blackface photo from years ago, managed to survive, and subsequently gain huge popularity after it somehow faded into the background, and perhaps Cuomo can do the same. But this is different, current, bigger and, well, there’s an official report that won’t go away.
As a political animal, it would appear that Cuomo is doomed, and that’s the way politics works.
But what also matters is that the effort to conflate this investigation with a verdict, with due process, with what this means when extrapolated into the bigger picture. The Attorney General conducted an investigation and issued a report. This is no different than the FBI conducted an investigation. This is no different than a prosecutor obtained an indictment. This is an accusation which the people doing the investigation believe, and say, shows it to be credible and valid. But that’s all this is.
When Gov. Andrew Cuomo first faced allegations of sexual harassment, many New York politicians were ready to impeach him. But other officials, and many voters, insisted they could not judge before a thorough and official investigation. Mr. Cuomo deserved due process.
That was a reasonable position, at least for the allegations that Mr. Cuomo did not really dispute. But now Mr. Cuomo has received the process that was his due: Independent lawyers deputized by the state attorney general’s office conducted a full investigation while Mr. Cuomo remained in office.
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So the question for New York legislators is this: Now that the allegations have been vetted — now that Mr. Cuomo has received the process he was due — are they ready to judge his fitness for office? Or were their procedural objections always a pretext to ensure the governor’s impunity?
This comes from Alexandra Brodsky, a found of “Know Your IX.” It’s not an accident that throughout her op-ed, she repeats the words “due process” in various permutations, and takes as a given that now, after this investigation by AG James, Cuomo has “received the process he was due.”
What Cuomo received was an investigation. What Cuomo did not receive was an adversarial hearing, an opportunity to cross-examine his accusers, the witnesses against him. You see, Brodsky’s might not be so concerned about Cuomo as she is about trying to deceive the public into confusing what happened here, and what’s sufficient to call for the resignation of a governor, with what should happen to others accused of sex offenses.
Whether accused at work, at school or in a courtroom, all people should be provided the basics of due process: notice of the allegation; a chance to tell their side of the story; judgment by impartial decision makers. Fair investigations help everyone, victims and the accused alike.
Except that’s not at all what the basics of due process require, as hundreds of federal courts have made clear, and as Brodsky most assuredly knows and works so hard to conceal. It’s a crafty move on Brodsky’s part, bootstrapping the widespread outrage against Cuomo, the embrace of an investigation as if it’s a trial and the investigators’ conclusions are untouchable and irrefutable, to spin this to her real agenda, that when a college’s investigator says a male student is guilty, they’ve received the same robust due process as Andy Cuomo. After all, everybody condemned Cuomo and bought the report as conclusive, so why isn’t that enough due process for every guy accused of a sex offense?
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