Months after former aide Lindsey Boylan accused Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, and a day after she published an essay detailing her allegations, the Time’s Up organization called for an independent probe of the New York governor.
“Allegations of inappropriate behavior in any workplace are deeply troubling and should be addressed. We call on the Cuomo administration to conduct a full and independent investigation into these claims immediately,” the organization said in a statement Thursday.
Time’s Up grew out of Hollywood’s #MeToo stand against decades of bad behavior by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who is now serving a 23-year sentence for rape.
Meanwhile, Rose McGowan, a victim of Weinstein’s sexual crimes, told a media outlet that she believes Boylan. “She, none of us, should endure what she endured,” the actress told Fox News Thursday.
In an essay published Wednesday on Medium, Boylan shared details about the governor allegedly going out of his way to touch her repeatedly on her lower back, arms and legs; proposing that they play strip poker during an official plane flight; and kissing her on the lips unexpectedly and without consent as she was leaving his New York City office.
Cuomo’s office challenged the allegations.
“Ms. Boylan’s claims of inappropriate behavior are quite simply false,” the governor’s press secretary, Caitlin Girouard, said in a statement Wednesday. Girouard provided a link to a list of all flights the governor took in October 2017, none of which revealed the combination of passengers Boylan described in her essay.
The statement cited four witnesses as saying they were on one or more of the flights and denying that the alleged strip-poker conversation ever happened.
The original Time’s Up founding document was signed by more than 300 women in the entertainment industry, including Ashley Judd and Asia Argento, two of the women who spoke to the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively, in articles that broke the Weinstein scandal in 20`17.
Among the other famous signatories then: Ava DuVernay, Charlize Theron, Evan Rachel Wood, Jane Fonda, Kerry Washington and Meryl Streep.
The New York governor, who was seen as a star early in the pandemic, is now under fire for his decision to send elderly COVID-19 patients back to nursing homes and then allegedly obscuring the numbers of nursing-home patients who died.
In recent days, more attention has been paid to the sexual harassment allegations, which were first made on Twitter in December. Boylan resigned from her job in September 2018.
McGowan called Cuomo’s alleged actions — which Boylan said happened while the Weinstein saga was erupting and the #MeToo movement was in full swing — “egregious and disgusting.”
Boylan said in her essay that she hoped sharing her story would “clear the path for other women to do the same.”
“Cuomo has created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected,” she wrote. “His inappropriate behavior toward women was an affirmation that he liked you, that you must be doing something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak up, you would face consequences.”
