At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Andrew Cuomo was the father of New Yorkers. Every day, the Democratic Governor of New York State gave his advice on how to fight the virus during press conferences – which earned him an Emmy Award in November 2020. Between Donald Trump, who proposed to drink disinfectant, and the unloved Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio, he was considered the “Governor of America”. He was seen interviewed on CNN by his own brother, Chris, with whom he bickered over which of them was their mother’s favourite.
At that time, while doubts remained on Joe Biden, some even lamented that the state governor, elected three times since 2010, was not the Democratic presidential candidate for 2020. Andrew Cuomo, 63, gave the image of a man who had managed the Covid crisis well, when New York had become its planetary epicenter. And then everything fell apart.
Harassment charges
First on the management of Covid-19: we learned that the State of New York had sent patients who tested positive to retirement homes to free up places in hospitals, which would have accelerated the pandemic. He had also not included in the deaths of these establishments the 3,800 patients who had gone to die in hospital or at home. The case did not change the total death toll in New York state (47,500, including 15,000 people from nursing homes, regardless of where they died), but shed a harsh light on the management of these establishments.
The governor’s services counterattacked by asserting that his policy was in accordance with federal directives and that the contaminations were above all due to the caregivers. In the middle of the election campaign, Andrew Cuomo did not want Donald Trump to set up the bad example (Democrat) of New York and launch a federal investigation.
Then came, since the beginning of the year, the accusations of sexual harassment. The former assistant to the governor, Lindsey Boylan, 36, accuses Cuomo of having harassed her and of having offered her, in 2017, a game of strip poker on board the private jet of the State of New York. Another collaborator, Charlotte Bennett, 25, said Cuomo asked her, in June 2020, if she had ever had sex with older men and attempted to kiss him. Mme Bennett had taken these grievances to the Chief of Staff, who immediately found him a new assignment on the other side of the Capitol in Albany, the state capital.
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