A female state trooper who says that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo touched her inappropriately when she was a member of his protective detail sued him, his longtime top aide and the New York State Police on Thursday, accusing them of discrimination and retaliation.
The filing of the lawsuit, which coincided with New York Democrats overwhelmingly endorsing Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, as their nominee in this year’s election, was a reminder that he still faces potential legal jeopardy over the events that hastened his resignation in August.
The trooper appears to be the first of 11 women who have accused Cuomo of sexual misconduct to sue him. Her suit came several weeks after the Oswego County district attorney decided, like his counterparts in four other counties, against charging Cuomo criminally over acts that the former governor’s accusers said had occurred in his jurisdiction.
The trooper, identified as Trooper 1, recounts in the suit what she says were repeated instances of unwanted physical contact and numerous suggestive remarks that Cuomo subjected her to after she was transferred onto his security detail, despite lacking the necessary credentials. An investigation by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, corroborated the trooper’s accusations and those of the other women.
“He arranged for the service requirements to be changed so that Trooper 1 could be close to him,” says the trooper’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York’s Eastern District. “He then sexually harassed her.”
In naming Cuomo’s longtime aide, Melissa DeRosa, and the state police as defendants, the trooper argues that the former governor’s offending behaviour could have been stopped but was not.
“The governor did not act alone,” the suit says. “He was enabled by the machinery of the state.”
In a statement, Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, characterized the suit as meritless and said that the law firm representing the trooper, Wigdor LLP, “is widely known to use the press to extort settlements on behalf of ‘anonymous claimants.’ ”
Cuomo, Azzopardi said in the statement, “will fight every attempt at cheap cash extortions and is anxious to have the dirty politics stop.”
He continued, “We look forward to justice in a court of law.”
Valdi Licul, one of the trooper’s lawyers, responded to Azzopardi by saying that Cuomo was “only making his legal problems worse by lashing out at his victim and her counsel with false and defamatory statements intended to further retaliate against her and defame us.”
Like Azzopardi, Paul Shechtman, a lawyer for DeRosa, was dismissive of the suit.
“We are only aware of this case from Twitter, but according to the trooper’s own testimony, Melissa’s only interaction with her was to say ‘hello and goodbye,’” Shechtman said in the statement. “It is not a viable case anywhere in America and is beyond frivolous.”
The suit does not make specific allegations against the state police but accuses the agency, along with Cuomo and DeRosa, of discrimination and retaliation. A Wigdor firm spokesperson said the agency was named as a defendant because it is the trooper’s employer.
A state police spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy against doing so in active litigation.
The trooper repeats in her suit what she told the attorney general’s investigators: that the governor began to flirt with her shortly after they first met, that he spoke with senior members of his security staff about having her join the protective detail and that she was soon given the coveted assignment.
Among other things, the suit says that at an event at Belmont Park, in Elmont, New York, in September 2019, Cuomo ran the palm of his hand over her navel and slid it across her waist to her right hip, where her gun was holstered. The act, the suit says, made her feel “violated.”
A senior state police investigator “fully corroborated” the female trooper’s account of the episode, according to the report that came out of the attorney general’s inquiry.
Cuomo has consistently attacked the investigation overseen by James as a politically motivated exercise by a fellow Democrat who had her own designs on the governor’s job. James announced a run for governor in October but abandoned it a few weeks later. On Thursday, New York Democrats endorsed her bid for reelection this year.
Cuomo has denied ever acting inappropriately with the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, saying they misconstrued behaviour on his part that might have been out of step with the times but was not meant to be sexual.
In dismissing the substance of the trooper’s claims, Azzopardi noted in his statement the district attorneys’ decisions not to file criminal charges against Cuomo. He did not mention that none of the five had discounted the women’s accusations and that several had used words like “deeply troubling” and “credible” to characterize the allegations.
