by David Balashinsky
Let's begin by acknowledging a few facts.
First: there were numerous allegations of inappropriate touching and comments of a sexual nature made against Andrew Cuomo beginning in 2020.
Second: the Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York investigated these allegations and issued a report on 3 August 2021 in which it concluded that these claims were credible. As the report states in its Executive Summary,
. . . we find that the Governor sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and nonconsensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women. Our investigation revealed that the Governor's sexually harassing behavior was not limited to members of his own staff, but extended to other State employees, including a State Trooper on his protective detail and members of the public. We also conclude that the Executive Chamber's culture - one filled with fear and intimidation, while at the same time normalizing the Governor's frequent flirtations and gender-based comments - contributed to the conditions that allowed the sexual harassment to occur and persist.
Third: all of these allegations were made by women. This matters because Cuomo has claimed that there is nothing sexual in nature about how he physically interacts with people: "You can go find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people, men, women. It is my usual customary way of greeting."
Fourth: in the face of these credible allegations of sexual harassment, overwhelming public pressure to resign (including from many members of his own political party, up to and including President Biden), the unequivocally damning findings of the Attorney General's report, and facing the likelihood of impeachment, Cuomo resigned in disgrace on 24 August 2021.
Fifth: Throughout this entire episode, Cuomo has denied doing anything that rises to the level of illegal sexual harassment, as defined under the law. Only this week, Cuomo reasserted this claim as though the decision by several local prosecutors not to formally charge him amounted to a full exoneration:
Now, they did a report that said there were eleven cases against me. Since then . . . five district attorneys have investigated the report of the much-publicized eleven violations of law. And do you know how many cases of the eleven they found to bring? . . . Zero. Zero. Zero cases. Why? Because there is a difference between an individual's opinion as to what they believe is offensive behavior and a legal violation. You can have an opinion about what is right and wrong, but that doesn't make your opinion the law.
At the same venue where he delivered these comments, Cuomo explicitly equated not being prosecuted with being exonerated: "And now the truth has actually come forth and I feel vindicated."
A decision by a district attorney, or even several, not to indict someone is not the same thing as an exoneration, of course, just as a finding of "not guilty" by a jury is not the same thing as a finding of "innocent."
Fortunately, none of this matters for my purpose here, which is not to argue that Cuomo is guilty, under the law, of having committed sexual harassment but, rather, to dispute the central premise of his claims of innocence. Namely, that those instances (those, that is, that are not in dispute) that have been described by numerous women complainants as sexually inappropriate touching and comments all amounted to nothing more than a misunderstanding due to "generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't appreciate." Cuomo made this argument in his resignation speech: "In my mind, I've never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn." And he did so, again, the other day at God's Battalion of Prayer Church, in Brooklyn:
Last February, several women raised issues about my behavior. As I said then, . . . my behavior has been the same for forty years in public life. . . . But, that was actually the problem. Because for some people, especially younger people, there's a new sensitivity. No one ever told me that I made them feel uncomfortable. I never sensed that I caused anyone discomfort. . . . But, I've been called old-fashioned, out of touch. And I've been told that my behavior was not politically correct or appropriate. I accept that. . . . Social norms evolve and they evolve quickly. . . . But I didn't appreciate how fast their perspective changed. And I should have. No excuses. . . . However, the truth is also that, contrary to what my political opponents would have had you believe, nothing that I did violated the law or the regulations.
Call this what you will - deflection, denial, gaslighting, a stratagem in which Cuomo tactically concedes a little bit of ground in order to occupy a more advantageous position from which to mount a defense - what Cuomo is doing here is making a feint of being out of touch and socially clumsy in order to render his sexually-inappropriate behavior wholly innocent of any inappropriateness. It wasn't me - it's all in your head! You're misconstruing something that was totally innocent! How many times have women been told things like these and made to feel as though the problem is all in their heads? That they're hypersensitive. That we are living in an age of political correctness run amok. That's gaslighting.
That Cuomo not only would persist in his campaign of gaslighting his victims (and not just them but the public, too) but would choose a Black church in which to do so is reprehensible. And that he would invoke Black History Month, the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the names of John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in his self-serving campaign of gaslighting is beyond reprehensible.
So, who or what, in Cuomo's telling, is really to blame in all this? Why, "cancel culture," of course:
Don't underestimate the strength and the virulence of the cancel culture. It's not just in politics. Today, even some members of the press are afraid to ask questions that challenge the so-called politically correct cancel-culture thinking. Do you know how many reporters told me they knew the report against me was a fraud but they were afraid to challenge MeToo claims?
Even as he offers denials, deflections and non-apology apologies for his conduct, Cuomo paints himself as a victim of "prosecutorial misconduct," "abuse of power" and "government corruption":
So eleven months later, the truth is known. But it's too late. Justice too long delayed is justice denied. The report did the damage it was designed to do. My father was right. Politics can be a dirty business.
Cuomo goes on to represent himself as a martyr and compares his struggle for justice against the accusations of sexual harassment to the civil rights movement:
Seeing what they did here broke my heart. And I'm trying to cross the bridge. And I'm trying to get from a negative place to a positive place. Romans Five: We can find glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance. . . . Congressman [John] Lewis said these words: "Do not get lost in the sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic, our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, a year but the struggle of a lifetime. . . . " I find inspiration in those words. Genesis tells us that good can come from suffering, and that life is about tomorrow, not yesterday. They broke my heart, but they didn't break my spirit.
All this in an attempt to avoid accountability for sexually harassing eleven different women on numerous occasions. I can only imagine how Cuomo's sanctimonious and self-serving pietism must turn the stomachs of his victims.
If Cuomo is to be taken at his word, I think that the only fair thing to do is to compare his position to that of a similarly-situated person. To return to the essence of his argument, it is that the world has changed and that his only fault is having failed to change along with it. He claims that it's all about "generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't appreciate." What Cuomo is asking us to believe is that he, someone who came of age in the early 1970s, at the very time that second-wave feminism was burgeoning and exploding upon the public's consciousness, when "Miss" and "Mrs." became "Ms.," when women were routinely out in the streets protesting sex discrimination and criticizing the sexualization and rampant objectification of women's bodies, when the first sexual harassment cases were making headlines, when the very term sexual harassment entered both the legal and the popular lexicon, - that he, a graduate of Fordham University who went on to receive a law degree from Albany Law School (1982) and who entered public life working as a district attorney and a practicing lawyer at precisely the period during which sexual-harassment law was being established in case law, culminating in its codification in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, when sexual-harassment training was being instituted in colleges and universities, offices and factories, becoming nearly ubiquitous and, in many cases, mandatory - that somehow, Cuomo missed all this. He wasn't aware of any of it. That claim shouldn't even be dignified by taking it seriously.
But let me not be accused of failing to give Cuomo the benefit of the doubt. Cuomo's claim is that all of these monumental social and legal changes throughout the 70's, 80's, 90's and beyond somehow occurred without his knowing about any of them because of the "generational and cultural" milieu in which he has lived the entirety of his life. As I said, I think a reasonable test of this claim would be to compare Cuomo with someone from the same generational and cultural milieu. In order to be fair, such a comparison should be to someone who shares not one but several demographic characteristics with Cuomo - and the more particulars in which Cuomo and this control agree, the more reasonable the test.
Toward which end I volunteer myself. I am the same age as Cuomo. I am from the same state as Cuomo. I am from the same city as Cuomo. I am even from the same borough as Cuomo (Queens). We are both White, cis-gender, hetero males. We both come from middle-class families, we are both college-educated and we are both considered professionals. I'm even a registered Democrat, just like Cuomo. It's true that I am not trained as an attorney, although I was trained and served as an investigator for the Sexual Harassment Committee at the college that I attended. That could count against me and for Cuomo, of course, but any such advantage to him and disadvantage to me in this respect is more than offset by the fact that Cuomo's father, by all accounts, was an honorable man, whereas mine was not only an inveterate sexist but a serial sex-abuser. If either of us might be expected not to know how to recognize borders or where "the line" is, it shouldn't be the former governor.
All of these circumstances - these points of similarity between Andrew Cuomo and me - enable me to state with certainty that "the line has [not] been redrawn," unbeknownst to Cuomo. He doesn't get to use that as an excuse. Running one's finger down the spine or caressing the abdomen of a woman state trooper who isn't one's wife or girlfriend (and doing so in pubic, even if she is) has not been permissible at any time in my life that I can remember. Likewise, asking creepy questions about a subordinate's sexual-assault history and whether she is into dating older men, and the various other sexually-harassing things that Cuomo is credibly alleged by these eleven women to have done.
Two points must be borne in mind here: first, I speak as someone whose "generational and cultural" background is identical to Cuomo's and, second, this generational and cultural background is what Cuomo would have us regard as exculpatory of his behavior. It is precisely because our backgrounds are so similar that I no more believe Cuomo is genuinely, naively and innocently ignorant of where "the line" is than I believe he didn't cross it.
* * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment