27 March 2021: How Did Governor Cuomo Personally Gain From Nursing Home Deaths Coverup?

Cuomo’s Textbook Violations of His Own Sexual Harassment Law

Alex Burke is an employment lawyer who "regularly brings, defends, and investigates sexual harassment claims in New York". While this op-ed mainly focuses on the sexual harassment allegations facing Governor Cuomo, Berke identifies a common theme among all Governor Cuomo's scandals:

Cuomo’s multiple overlapping current (and former) crises, also including a cover-up of nursing home deaths, share a theme: abuse of power for personal gain. The sexual harassment claims, from eight women so far, including several staffers who worked for him, clearly demonstrate violations of the NYS Human Rights Law prohibiting sexual harassment—which the governor took credit for expanding. This law creates clear liability for the governor based on the actions currently alleged, including ones he’s admitted to.

Do click through for Berke's discussion of how New York's Human Rights Law applies to Cuomo's sexual harassment allegations, in which the alleged retaliation against accusers represents the textbook violations that make these cases easy to demonstrate in court.

From our reading, although Berke throws Governor Cuomo's undercounting of COVID nursing homes deaths scandal into the mix as an example of Governor Cuomo's abuse of power for personal gain, she doesn't connect the dots to demonstrate it in this article. What personal gain did Governor Cuomo realize through hiding the full extent of COVID deaths in New York nursing homes?

We'll connect some of those dots here. We think the cover-up would have provided at least the two following major personal gains to Governor Cuomo:

• It was intended to avoid prosecution for criminally negligent homicide or first degree manslaughter under New York state law and for involuntary manslaughter under federal law for COVID deaths that resulted from the implementation of Governor Cuomo's 25 March 2020 directive. Estimates of the additional COVID deaths that resulted from the enforcement of this policy in New York nursing homes above and beyond what would have happened without it range between 1,000 and 5,000. (At this writing, we think it's closer to the 1,000 figure.)
• New York's deliberate undercount of COVID nursing home resident deaths allowed Governor Cuomo to falsely claim that New York's COVID nursing home deaths ranked Number 46 in the U.S., which would put New York among the Top 5 states in the U.S. for this measure. The claim was used to falsely burnish his leadership performance during 2020's coronavirus pandemic, which Governor Cuomo parlayed into a seven-figure book deal.

We think Berke is right about Governor Cuomo's scandals being connected by a common theme.