[Content warning: Sexual harassment]

Two things are, simultaneously, true. First: Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, has been accused of sexually harassing at least 13 different women during his time in office. Second: Cuomo is now the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, and top Democrats are reportedly “shying away” or “biting their tongues” rather than criticizing him. In fact, some prominent New York Dems have even voiced their support for Cuomo’s candidacy. Representative Ritchie Torres was the first to endorse the ex-governor, praising his “competence and courage” and saying that “America loves a comeback” before he even became an official candidate. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who called for Cuomo’s resignation in 2021, now says that “He has a lot of talent as an executive, he’s been a very strong governor.” Even Governor Kathy Hochul, who once condemned what she called “repulsive & unlawful behavior by the Governor towards multiple women,” is now noncommittal, saying only that she’ll “go forward in light of where we are today and deal with whatever the voters decide to deal with.” 

What a difference four years can make! But perhaps this willingness to brush Cuomo’s harassment scandal aside shouldn’t be surprising coming from the Democrats. After all, he’s not the only one who’s been given a pass. Like Cuomo, former President Bill Clinton has a laundry list of sexual harassment and assault allegations against him. And yet, he was a guest of honor at the DNC and a prominent surrogate for Kamala Harris on the campaign trail last year. The fact that these alleged abusers are still welcome in the Democratic Party is a major indictment of that party’s values—or rather, its lack of them. You can’t accept men like Clinton and Cuomo among your top ranks while also claiming to be the party of women’s rights. And if you do, nobody should believe you.

People’s memories are short these days, so it may be necessary to remind everyone—unpleasant as it is—of exactly what Cuomo has been accused of. In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finally released a statement on its investigation into the ex-governor, along with the resulting agreement between the DOJ and the State of New York to enact workplace reforms, and it was damning. The DOJ concluded that Cuomo had subjected “at least thirteen female employees of New York State” to “unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact; ogling; unwelcome sexual comments; gender-based nicknames; comments on their physical appearances; and/or preferential treatment based on their physical appearances.” Notably, that seems to indicate the DOJ had uncovered two more accusers than the New York Attorney General’s office, which had listed 11 on its own report back in August 2021. (An unfortunate fact for Cuomo, whose lawyers have attempted to dismiss the DOJ report by claiming it was “based entirely on” the New York AG’s.) 

For each of the 11 women who appear in that initial report, we have firsthand testimony of what they experienced, ranging from Cuomo making inappropriate sexual comments at work to unwanted kisses and groping. At least one of the incidents was caught on camera, as you can hear Cuomo telling a medical worker that “you make that gown look good” while she administered a COVID test to him in 2020. On another occasion, Cuomo reportedly arranged to have a female state trooper assigned to his security detail despite her lacking the necessary seniority, then asked her why she didn’t wear a dress on the job and subjected her to unwanted touching. Taken together, the reports show him behaving like the worst kind of sexist boss from the 1950s or ’60s, leaving his employees feeling anywhere from “sort of icky” to “completely violated” as a result. Even one such allegation would be a stain on any public figure’s record; 11 or 13 is a complete disgrace. 

This isn’t just a matter of past misconduct, either. Because Cuomo is running for a new office, and he shows no real signs of remorse for the distress he’s caused people, anyone who endorses him is potentially condemning future employees to be harassed as well. A vote for Cuomo is a vote to create a toxic workplace, since anyone working in the New York mayor’s office would just have to accept a risk of creepy comments—or worse—from their new boss as part of the job. The thought is revolting. And yet, Ritchie Torres and Kirsten Gillibrand are still giving Cuomo their praise, and Kathy Hochul seemingly can’t bring herself to say a bad word about him. 

Unfortunately, there is a precedent for this kind of thing in Democratic politics. In 2021, practically every prominent Democrat demanded Cuomo’s resignation—from progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to moderates like Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, all the way up to President Biden (who’s no stranger to this kind of allegation himself). But one did not: former President Bill Clinton. According to Cuomo’s former advisor Lis Smith, Clinton—who was the “sole exception” to the chorus telling Cuomo that his career was effectively over—instead urged him to “go out and address the people of New York directly” to plead his case. And it’s not hard to see why Clinton would take that view. After all, dodging accountability had always worked out well for him. 

Over the years, Bill Clinton has been accused of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape by several women, most famously Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick. Even the infamous Lewinsky affair involved a disturbing power imbalance—between the most powerful person in the world and an intern less than half his age (she was 22, he was 49)—which Lewinsky now describes as “wholly inappropriate,” even if the sexual acts involved were technically consensual. Throughout, Clinton’s approach to these allegations has been to ignore them whenever possible, flatly deny many of them, and even lie to the American public (though he’d later admit his relationship with Lewinsky was “not appropriate.”) And it’s all worked out for him. Not a single Democrat voted for his 1998 impeachment, which failed to remove him from office or even deliver any real penalty, and Clinton’s standing within the Democratic Party has never been meaningfully endangered by any of these cases. As Moira Donegan wrote for the Guardian last year, Democratic partisans still embrace Clinton as if nothing had ever happened:

This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.[...]

 

Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.

In other words, Democrats’ opposition to sexual abuse is not an absolute principle. They’re flexible about it. It depends very much who the accused is, and what status he has within the party. The allegations against men like Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump are an acceptable target for criticism, because they’re partisan opponents. Even when it’s a less powerful elected Democrat like Senator Al Franken—who faced accusations similar to Andrew Cuomo’s back in 2017—the Democrats are capable of behaving with the appropriate level of outrage. They roundly denounced Franken and pressured him into an early retirement from politics, so quickly that there’s even some question about whether he got an appropriate due process. But Clinton? Cuomo? They come from two of the Democratic Party’s biggest nepotistic dynasties—Cuomo because his father Mario was governor of New York before him, and Clinton because people erroneously thought Hillary would be a future president. Their connections run deep. And so the Democrats treat them as untouchable, when really they should have been pushed out of their positions of prominence years ago. 

Obviously, this is disgusting on a moral and ethical level. But it also creates a serious political liability for the Democrats, one that’s come back to haunt them at the worst possible moments. During the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump should have been dead in the water after the Access Hollywood tape, with its skin-crawling audio of Trump boasting about “grabbing” women non-consensually, came out. If his opponent had been virtually anyone other than Hillary Clinton, he would have been toast. But because Trump was up against the Clintons, he was able to turn the tables. In a sleazy, yet effective publicity stunt, he held a surprise press conference with four of Bill’s accusers and invited them to sit in the audience at the next debate, shifting the media’s attention onto the Democratic president’s sordid past and distracting from his own. Thanks to Bill Clinton and the party leadership that kept him around all those years, the whole subject of women’s rights—which should have been one of Hillary’s strongest selling points—ended up being used against her. Where there should have been a stark difference between the parties, there just wasn’t. 

For his part, Andrew Cuomo seems to have learned absolutely nothing from the abrupt end of his term as New York’s governor. During a recent press conference, he was asked what his biggest mistakes in office were, and he didn’t mention the harassment scandal once—nor, for that matter, his decision to put COVID-positive patients in New York nursing homes. Instead, the regrets he listed included not putting enough cops on New York subways, being “impatient with the process,” and taking “everything too seriously.” Drawing from the Clinton playbook, he’s avoided talking about his accusers whenever possible. When asked directly about them by ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, he had this to say: 

A number of women made claims about inappropriate behavior. A report was issued. I said that was a political report. It was politically motivated, and politically done. It was also a hyper-political time. [...] Nothing has come from any of them. So time brings out the truth. I said at that time it was political, and three years later, millions of dollars later in terms of people investigating complaints, nothing has come from any of those complaints. My opponents want to talk about the past because they don’t want to talk about the present, and they don’t want to talk about the city and the condition that the city is in, and what they have done to the city with this anti-cop reduction of the police force. 

That’s right, folks: Cuomo’s defense of himself is that, since no convictions have yet “come from” any criminal charges against him, he is not, legally speaking, a sex criminal. And if you ask about the subject, you’re actually living in the past, and possibly “anti-cop.” Inspiring stuff. 

It’s one thing for Cuomo himself to bluster and dodge in this way. Anyone trying to resurrect their political career after a serious scandal would attempt something similar. But why are figures like Torres, Gillibrand, and Hochul letting him get away with it? There are a few factors at work. The dynastic privilege attached to the Cuomo name is one, just as it was for the Clintons. Cowardice is another. Cuomo has a reputation for being vindictive, and he reportedly retaliated against at least four of his accusers in various ways, so people might reasonably fear what he’d do against prominent critics if he becomes mayor. That isn’t an excuse for not speaking out. But there’s also a third, unavoidable conclusion: that prominent Democrats support Cuomo because, well, they support him and what he stands for politically. 

In his new mayoral campaign, Cuomo’s platform has two main planks: pro-cop and pro-Israel. As we know, these are closely interlinked subjects. The NYPD routinely sends its officers to Israel to learn how to brutalize minorities more effectively, and when they return home they’ve been deployed to ruthlessly suppress pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests. Cuomo supports all this. In the leadup to his mayoral announcement, he “helped pave the way for his return from the political wilderness” by organizing a pro-Israel lobbying group called “Never Again, NOW!” whose main goals include opposing “anti-Zionist rhetoric” in New York. He also joined what the New York Post described as a “high-powered legal team” to defend Benjamin Netanyahu against war crimes charges from the International Criminal Court, and said he was “proud” to do it. And in the video announcing his candidacy, he declared that “the law must be aggressively enforced” against “antisemitism” while showing footage of a pro-Palestinian rally at Fordham University, indicating that “antisemitism” really just means protest. He has also stopped short of condemning the fascistic arrest and disappearance of student protester Mahmoud Khalil, saying only that “facts and evidence must be presented” and the Trump administration should be “clear with the public about the justification for their position and actions.” 

Cuomo has also been scaremongering about a supposed crime wave in New York City, saying that “You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis.” In his interview with Smith, he explicitly blamed the 2020 backlash to George Floyd’s murder for the alleged disaster:

You’ve had this move starting in about 2020, an anti police movement, right? Cut the funding for the police. Police are bad. [...] Well, that has consequences. You cut the police, don’t be surprised when crime goes up. You cut the police, don’t be surprised when people are afraid to go into the subways because of the rate of crime.

This is a distinctly Trumpian worldview, especially the part about “the migrant influx.” It’s also completely false. Leftists skeptical of the police are not in power in New York City. Eric Adams, a former cop himself, is, and he’s been showering the NYPD with billions of dollars in funding, not cutting it. (In fact, police in New York have a budget more than six times the size of Chicago’s, the next most expensive in the country, and hundreds of individual NYPD employees have made more than $100,000 a year in overtime pay alone.) It’s schools, libraries, and other important social services that have faced cuts. And according to the NYPD’s own data, crime has dropped, not risen, in most categories between 2023 and 2024, with homicides and shootings declining in the city for three years straight. Even the subway, where New Yorkers do sometimes feel unsafe, has seen crime “plummet.” But Cuomo ignores all this. He also ignores horrifying incidents like the NYPD shooting four people over subway fare evasion, or standing uselessly by as a woman burned to death, which show that the police are more a threat to ordinary New Yorkers’ lives than they are a safeguard of them. Like with Trump, the truth clearly doesn’t matter very much to him. 

Ritchie Torres, never the most subtle member of the Democratic caucus, just comes out and says it: he is uninterested in “relitigating” the question of Cuomo’s harassment because he likes Cuomo’s right-wing agenda. He believes Cuomo is a “tough guy” capable of “confronting the crisis of crime”—which, as we’ve seen, is not a real crisis—and “confronting political extremism in New York,” by which he means criticism of Israel. Specifically, he has endorsed Cuomo in order to fend off the “extremism” of democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, who Torres calls—using somewhat Islamophobic language—“treacherously smart.” It’s not like Cuomo was Torres’s only option. There is a crowded field of Democratic candidates who exist somewhere on a spectrum between him and Mamdani, including state Senator Jessica Ramos, Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation to Eric), and even the incumbent mayor. But Torres has made his position clear. He would prefer to have a mayor with a raft of sexual misconduct allegations who is maximally pro-Israel and pro-cop, rather than a mayor without those allegations who might be even mildly critical of either. Hochul and Gillibrand have been canny enough to avoid openly saying this, but their politics align with Cuomo’s too. Gillibrand was one of several U.S. Senators (along with, inevitably, John Fetterman) who sponsored a bill last year to crack down on “antisemitism” while expanding its definition to include criticism of Israel, while Hochul was behind the surge of cops and National Guard troops on New York’s subways last year, and has personally stepped in to force CUNY to remove a job listing for a Palestinian Studies professor whose curriculum have discussed “settler colonialism.” Cuomo’s agenda suits them perfectly—and so they either stay quiet about his allegations or, in Gillibrand’s case, actually give him praise. 

This is bigger than New York. Right now, America stands at a terrible crossroads when it comes to women’s rights, as the Trump administration and the wider GOP are trying to take them away wherever possible. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and allowed red states to implement deadly abortion bans, was just the start. In some states, Republican legislators have started trying to eliminate no-fault divorce and undermine women’s voting rights as well. In the last election, J.D. Vance openly mocked any woman who chooses not to have children, and restrictions on contraception appear to be next on the GOP’s creepy “pro-natalist” agenda. But at this critical moment in the country’s history, the Democrats are looking compromised. They can’t claim to be principled defenders of women’s rights when Bill Clinton is standing in the spotlight at the DNC, and when Andrew Cuomo might be the next Democratic mayor of New York City. If they criticize the Trump cabal for the disturbing allegations about Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or even Linda McMahon, Trump’s team can point right back to Clinton and Cuomo and say “see, you have this problem too”—and they’d be right. A political party that was in any way serious about challenging gender-based abuse wouldn’t allow this kind of moral rot at its core. The fact that the Democrats have for so long demonstrates just how unserious they are, and how unprepared they are to face this moment.