Current Cuomo aide accuses governor of sexual harassment

A current aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo accused him of trying to cover up the allegation that he groped one of her colleagues — while also sharing her own disturbing interactions with her boss, according to a report Friday.

Alyssa McGrath told the New York Times that the unidentified accuser confided to her how Cuomo touched her breast under her blouse inside the Executive Mansion late last year.
“She froze when he started doing that stuff to her,” McGrath reportedly said.

Cuomo asked the woman not to discuss the alleged incident with McGrath, she said, adding that he knows they are friends who regularly speak and text with each other.

“He told her specifically not to tell me,” McGrath said.  

McGrath, 33, also detailed her own creepy encounters with Cuomo, 63, alleging that he looked down her blouse to compliment her on her necklace and told her, in Italian, that she’s beautiful.

In addition, McGrath said, Cuomo asked her about her lack of a wedding ring and the status of her divorce.

McGrath didn’t allege that Cuomo touched her inappropriately but said she believed his actions amounted to sexual harassment.

“He has a way of making you feel very comfortable around him, almost like you’re his friend,” McGrath said.

“But then you walk away from the encounter or conversation, in your head going, ‘I can’t believe I just had that interaction with the governor of New York.’”

Friday’s report made McGrath the first current state employee to publicly accuse Cuomo of misconduct amid a spiraling series of allegations that have prompted widespread calls for his resignation, as well as an independent investigation by Attorney General Letitia James and an impeachment investigation by the state Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.

The woman who was allegedly groped relayed her account to other people, according to the Albany Times Union, which learned about it from a source familiar with what she told them.

State officials referred the matter for possible criminal investigation by the Albany Police Department, Cuomo’s acting counsel, Beth Garvey, said last week.

It remains the most serious allegation against Cuomo to date.

McGrath said she was furious when she heard Cuomo claim during a March 3 news conference that “I never touched anyone inappropriately” — a phrase he has since repeated.

“It makes me really upset to hear him speak about this and completely deny all allegations,” she said.

“And I have no doubt in my mind that all of these accusers are telling the truth.”

McGrath has worked as an executive assistant in Cuomo’s office since May 2018, according to her resume on the LinkedIn website.

She earned $64,383 during fiscal 2019, when her base salary was $60,000, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy’s SeeThrough NY website.

McGrath doesn’t work directly for Cuomo, but emails show that both she and the woman who was groped were often summoned on weekends to the Capitol building or the Executive Mansion, Cuomo’s heavily fortified, official residence, the Times said.

The messages reportedly came from an unidentified, top scheduling official in Cuomo’s office.

One email, sent to both women and dated Feb. 29, 2020, said, “Hi gals,” and added, “Who can spend a little while with him when he gets back on the book signing project?”
It’s unclear what book is being referred to in that message.

In October, Crown Publishing Group released Cuomo’s memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” for which he reportedly received a seven-figure advance.

Earlier this month, Crown stopped promoting the book due to a federal probe into the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities amid the pandemic.

While the two women were working with Cuomo in the Capitol — on what turned out to be the Saturday before the state’s first confirmed case of the coronavirus — they discussed their plans to travel to Florida on vacation.

McGrath, who has a young child, was separated from her husband at the time but her co-worker was married and Cuomo asked if she was going to try to meet men and “mingle,” according to the Times.

Both women laughed off the question, but Cuomo “called us ‘mingle mamas’ for the rest of the day,” McGrath said.

McGrath told the Times that Cuomo began making her uncomfortable shortly after she was hired, and described an incident when she was called to his office in the Executive Mansion in early 2019.

Cuomo asked if McGrath, who is of Italian heritage, spoke Italian and then said something in that language which she later relayed to her parents to translate.

“It was commenting on how beautiful I was,” she said.

A short time later, she was called into Cuomo’s Capitol office to take dictation.

“I put my head down waiting for him to start speaking, and he didn’t start speaking,” she said. “So I looked up to see what was going on. And he was blatantly looking down my shirt.”

Cuomo then made a “subtle reference,” she said, to the necklace “in my shirt.”

“My face turned really hot,” she said.

McGrath also recounted an office Christmas party in 2019 during which Cuomo “kissed me on the forehead” and posed for a photo with her and her co-worker, in which “he is gripping our sides very tightly.”

Later, on New Year’s Eve, Cuomo asked the co-worker to pose for a photo with him in which their faces were nearly touching, and to send it to McGrath, she said.

McGrath said she suspects Cuomo wanted “to make me jealous.”“We were told from the beginning that was a typical move of his,” she said.

“Who was the girl of the week? Who was the girl of the month?”  

A lawyer for Cuomo, Rita Glavin, told the New York Times that “the governor has greeted men and women with hugs and a kiss on the cheek, forehead, or hand. Yes, he has posed for photographs with his arm around them. Yes, he uses Italian phrases like ‘ciao bella.’”

Glavin added: “None of this is remarkable, although it may be old-fashioned. He has made clear that he has never made inappropriate advances or inappropriately touched anyone.”

McGrath’s lawyer, Mariann Wang, responded, “The governor’s deflections are not credible.”

“This was not just friendly banter.  Ms. McGrath understands the common phrase ‘ciao Bella,'” Wang said.

“As she herself says: ‘I would not call my parents to find out what that phrase means. I know what that phrase means.'”