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 to fight the virus at press conferences – which earned him an Emmy Award, in November 2020. Enter Donald Trump, who proposed to drink disinfectant, and the unloved New York Mayor 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 favorite.
At that time, while doubts remained on Joe Biden, some even deplored that the governor of the state, elected three times since 2010, was not the Democratic presidential candidate of 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 it all fell apart.
Harassment charges
First on the management of Covid-19: we learned that New York State had referred 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 the 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 line with federal guidelines and that the contaminations were primarily due to caregivers. In the middle of the election campaign, Andrew Cuomo did not want Donald Trump to set the bad example (Democrat) of New York in a pinch and expedite a federal investigation.
Then came, since the beginning of the year, the accusations of sexual harassment. Former assistant governor Lindsey Boylan, 36, accuses Cuomo of harassing her and offering her, in 2017, a game of strip-poker on board the private jet in New York State. 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 communicated these grievances to the chief of staff, who immediately found him a new assignment at the other end of the Capitol in Albany, the state capital.
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