20 September 2021: Updated Profile of Lindsey Boylan

The woman who brought down Andrew Cuomo: ‘I dropped a nuclear bomb on my life’

This report provides an updated profile of Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to allege former New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo sexually harassed her. It also describes the retaliation taken against her by senior Cuomo officials after she went public. Here's an excerpt describing when she decided to come forward:

On 13 December, she was in the car with her husband and six-year-old daughter.

“I kept seeing his name on twitter feeds floated as a possible candidate for AG and it had reached fever pitch. I instantly started typing my reaction.”

She wrote: “Yes, @NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched. I could never anticipate what to expect: would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks. Or would it be both in the same conversation? This was the way for years.”

The fallout from those tweets would extend far beyond Ms Boylan’s own world. After a second woman, Charlotte Bennett, came forward, New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James launched an enquiry into the allegations. Ms Boylan was interviewed multiple times and gave hours of under-oath testimony to both the Attorney General’s attorneys and the State Assembly investigators.

The 165-page report was released on 3 August. The investigation found: “The Governor sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and non-consensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women.” It would ultimately lead to Mr Cuomo’s resignation, ending his 10-year run as governor, bringing down one of the most prominent Democrats in America, and devastating a family political legacy that stretched over almost 50 years.

The report concludes by updating what Boylan plans for pursuing accountability from the Cuomo administration officials who engaged in the unlawful retaliation:

“What I will focus future legal action on is the retaliation,” Ms Boylan says. “Because that is how I can affect the most change. I want to focus on accountability. There’s been some accountability, [but] not nearly enough, not for me and not nearly enough for too many women. The retaliation is what prevents women from coming forward because they’re going to remember that I was smeared.”

“Right now, I want to spend a little bit of time processing. When you have a traumatic experience, like the whole experience has been, it robs you of the presence of mind to be in wonderful experiences. So I will spend time just being present with my daughter in a way that she deserves. And then I’ll fight again because that’s what we have to do.”

The toxic environment she descibes is also one that allowed the fundamental inhumanity of the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive to be implemented at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands, of excess COVID deaths among New York nursing home residents without being challenged.