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Magazine

The Friday Read

‘THIS IS DISGUSTING’: AN INSIDER’S ACCOUNT ON THE FALL OF CUOMO

Kissing montages, Chris Cuomo’s interventions and the futile effort to save “Bad
Andrew” from himself.

"He’d led us down a path of defending him against claims of sexual harassment
without giving us the full truth. We felt betrayed and misled," Lis Smith says
in her upcoming book, Any Given Tuesday. | Victor J. Blue/The New York
Times/Redux Pictures

By Lis Smith

07/08/2022 04:30 AM EDT

*
*

* * Link Copied
* *
*
*

Lis Smith is the author of the forthcoming book, Any Given Tuesday.

“Governor. Stop. It’s over,” the voice broke through on the conference call
line.

Six months earlier, it would have been inconceivable that anyone, let alone a
mere political consultant, would cut off the most high-profile, fearsome, and
feared state chief executive in the country.

It was Andrew Cuomo who was talking, after all. He was 11 years into his reign
at the top of the Empire State, and just one year removed from becoming a
national phenomenon for his masterful, made-for-TV COVID briefings, which
offered comfort to people amidst the isolation, confusion and trauma of a global
pandemic.

But on August 3, 2021 — whether he was willing to accept it or not — he was a
dead man walking. That morning, the Attorney General of New York released a
bombshell report that concluded that he’d broken state law by sexually harassing
women staffers in his administration.

“What’s over?” Cuomo responded.

“This. All of this. This is over. There is no path forward for you,” the adviser
responded.

“It’s over because I touched a woman on the back?” Cuomo shot back, his voice
rising with a pitched tone of panic.

The adviser, someone not prone to hyperbole or challenging the governor
unnecessarily, didn’t mince words.

“It was more than touching a woman on the back. Don’t bullshit yourself or us.
If I, a man, were accused of doing any of the things you were, I would be out of
a job by now.”

Silence.

“So, you’re telling me I don’t fight back? I don’t do a press conference? Why
don’t I just resign then?”

Silence.

“Lis,” Cuomo started in his halting, Queens-inflected cadence, “what do you
think?”

He was looking for a sympathetic voice, as he often did on calls. He had a knack
for finding people who could agree with even his worst instincts. I paused
before I answered.

It had taken me 17 years — and 20 campaigns — to claw my way up the political
ladder and go from a lowly field organizer to one of the top communications
aides in the Democratic Party. Most recently, I’d served as a senior adviser on
Pete Buttigieg’s against-all-odds presidential campaign, where he’d defied
conventional wisdom, won the Iowa caucuses and become one of the Democratic
Party’s biggest stars. My star had risen as well.

Once Andrew Cuomo won a third term, Lis Smith (right) was off his campaign and
off to the races planning Pete Buttigieg's campaign for president. | Craig F.
Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

I’d had an on-off professional relationship with Cuomo for the past three years,
starting with his 2018 campaign, where I served as spokesperson and ran his
debate prep. I reconnected with him at the beginning of COVID’s onslaught on New
York in March of 2020, when he’d call me for thoughts on his daily briefings.
Now I was a part of his kitchen cabinet — the group of trusted, unofficial
advisers — that he was relying on to help him weather the allegations of sexual
harassment.

While Cuomo was notoriously tough on staff, he engendered a remarkable amount of
loyalty in the people around him. Yes, he could be irrational and impetuous at
times, but he matched that with a deep interpersonal warmth — showing up at
weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs and funerals. He always took the time to call
staffers dealing with loss and personal hardships. He’d also been a formidable
governor — the likes of which New York hadn’t seen in decades. He’d managed to
get the unruly state legislature under control and achieve some big things.

Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads,
smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. Sign up for the
newsletter.

The last several months had tested that loyalty, as it became increasingly clear
that Cuomo wasn’t being straight with any of us — myself included. He’d led us
down a path of defending him against claims of sexual harassment without giving
us the full truth. We felt betrayed and misled.

“Governor, I’d like to disagree,” I told him. “But I just don’t see a way out of
this.”

In the moment, I meant it as much for him as for me.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You might be asking yourself why, a year to the day after Buttigieg’s exit from
the presidential race, I found myself on a call not with Prince Charming but
with the “Prince of Darkness,” the political insider’s nickname for Cuomo.

Well, it was complicated.

It started with a cold call from him in the spring of 2018. His right-hand
woman, Melissa de Rosa, gave me a two-minute heads-up before the “No Caller ID”
popped onto my iPhone screen. It was a Monday night, and I was inundated with
work. I needed a call out of the blue from the governor of New York like I
needed an invitation to a one-year-old’s birthday party.

Some back story here: I’d worked in New York politics on-and-off since 2013, on
races of every level. For elected officials and candidates like Bill de Blasio,
Eliot Spitzer, Adriano Espaillat and Eric Gonzalez, among others. Still, in all
that time, there was one New York politician I had never met: Andrew Cuomo.

That night, Cuomo and I spent over an hour talking about politics and governance
— what they meant to each of us. We talked about our dads. His father, former
governor Mario Cuomo, had passed away a couple years earlier and mine was in
increasingly poor health. As the conversation wound down, he asked, “So, you’re
a yes?” I told him I was a maybe. I knew working for him was a risky
proposition, but risk has always been sort of my thing. Within three weeks I was
on his payroll.

Not that he really needed me in that race. Even though media and political
insiders took issue with Cuomo’s Raging Bull persona and tactics, it was hard to
argue with the results he’d yielded as governor. In two terms, he’d racked up a
list of legislative accomplishments that included marriage equality, tough
gun-control laws, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave and tuition-free college
for working- — and middle-class — New Yorkers. Once he won a third term, I was
off his campaign and off to the races planning Pete’s campaign for president.

MOST READ

1. HOUSE GOP MARCHES INTO DEEPER BLUE TERRAIN AS DEM PROSPECTS FADE

2. TRUMP LAWYER INTERVIEWED WITH FBI ABOUT BANNON CONTEMPT CASE

3. ‘YOU HAVE TO DO MORE': PARKLAND FATHER INTERRUPTS BIDEN’S GUN CONTROL SPEECH

4. HOW ABORTION IS SUNDERING AMY CONEY BARRETT’S HOMETOWN

5. ‘WE’RE JUST F---ING ILLEGAL’: LEAKED DOCUMENTS SHOW UBER THWARTED POLICE AND
SECRETLY COURTED POLITICIANS

As Andrew Cuomo rode high as “America’s governor” during the COVID-19 crisis,
with his daily briefings broadcast live on national TV, he was floated as a
replacement for Biden on the 2020 ticket and coronated as a front-runner for the
2024 Democratic nomination. | Getty Images and AP Photo

We continued to keep in touch as he rode high as “America’s governor” during the
COVID-19 crisis, his daily briefings broadcast live on national TV. “So,
Lis-beth,” he’d ask, using his preferred nickname for me, “What do you think?
How am I doing?” He rarely asked questions that he didn’t know the answer to,
and the answer was evident from the fawning media coverage he was receiving:
well, exceptionally well.

The hype got out of control, as it so often does. The bougie,
Resistance-friendly Lingua Franca brand sold $400 cashmere sweaters
hand-stitched with Cuomosexual across the chest. He won an Emmy Award for his
COVID-19 briefings. He was floated as a replacement for Joe Biden on the 2020
ticket (delusional) and coronated as a front-runner for the 2024 Democratic
nomination (fever dream).

He started to feel his oats. Just four months into the pandemic, he signed a
multimillion-dollar book deal with Random House to tout his leadership lessons
during the pandemic. It was the height of hubris. It was as if the head coach of
the Atlanta Falcons had walked off the field during the third quarter of the
2017 Super Bowl, satisfied enough with his team’s 28–3 lead over the Patriots to
write a book about lessons in winning the Lombardi Trophy. As everyone knows by
now, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady overcame the biggest deficit in Super Bowl
history to win that game 34–28. Just as the Patriots came roaring back, COVID
would, too, with a second devastating wave that took the lives of 14,000 more
New Yorkers — all while Cuomo was promoting his memoir.

Cuomo's administration was accused of undercounting the number of New York State
COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, attributing some of them to hospitals instead.
| Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo

He also began to dig in his heels about decisions he’d made early on in the
pandemic, specifically the policy of returning COVID-19 patients from hospitals
to their nursing homes. New York was hardly alone in implementing that policy,
which stipulated that the patients had to be medically stable and that the
facilities had to be able to properly care for them. Other states like New
Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan followed the same guidance. Whether the policy
was medically sound or not, Cuomo allowed the controversy around it to snowball.
His administration was accused of undercounting the number of New York State
COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, attributing some of them to hospitals instead.
It was a serious charge — and one that the Cuomo administration vigorously
disputed, noting that they assigned deaths to where they occurred, not to where
the deceased had contracted COVID. But they were slow to release the supporting
data, which didn’t help their cause. At best, it was interpreted as
incompetence. At worst, it was seen as a cover-up.

The crisis reached a nadir at a January press briefing during which Cuomo was
confronted about the undercount. Visibly bristling, he declared: “Look, whether
a person died in a hospital or died in a nursing home, the people died. … Who
cares?”

“Who cares” are two words that should never come out of a politician’s mouth.
Especially when it has to do with people dying.

America’s governor was quickly turning into America’s asshole. And like most
assholes, he’d soon get a wake-up call. Except in his case, it was more like an
air raid siren.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On February 24, 2021, a former administration employee accused him of sexual
harassment. Within hours, the allegations were picked up far and wide in the
media. And once again, I was getting roped in with a small group of outside
advisers to help Cuomo navigate the crisis. The ask was innocuous — “just a few
calls.” The assumption was that this would be a one-day story. Famous last
words.

My decision to say “yes” was grounded in the fact that I believed Cuomo’s denial
of the allegations, which had seemingly come out of left field. He’d been a
champion of the #MeToo movement — and in those days, I’d never heard so much as
a whisper about his personal conduct. Could he be flirtatious at times? Yes. Did
he occasionally make jokes of a sexual nature with staffers — both male and
female — at the workplace? Yes. Was he unusually into physicality as a
modern-day politician? Also yes. He fashioned himself after leaders like LBJ,
who was known for grabbing a lapel or 20 in his day.

Three of the women who accused Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment: Lindsey
Boylan (left), Brittany Commisso (center) and Charlotte Bennett (right). | AP
Photo

The easier answer, naturally, would have been no. But politics is filled with
cut-and-run artists — soulless social climbers who cling to elected officials
when they’re popular, then disappear the second they’re not. I never wanted to
be one of those people. I still struggled with the emotional scars of my own
brush with scandal — my personal relationship with Eliot Spitzer cost me a City
Hall job with de Blasio. It’s impossible to describe the isolation and
hopelessness that consume you when you’re in the eye of a PR shit storm. I
couldn’t live with myself if I let anyone I knew well go through it alone.
Obviously, my predicament was different — I wasn’t accused of doing harm or
wrong to anyone else. But in my eyes, at the time, there was little distinction.

Faced with the first accusation of sexual harassment, Cuomo swore to the crowd
advising him that nothing, nothing else would come out. It didn’t take long for
us to see that he wasn’t being completely truthful.

Just a few days later, a 25-year-old former executive assistant in the
governor’s office came forward with more accusations in the New York Times. She
recounted how the governor had repeatedly inquired about her relationship
status, talked about how he was lonely and tasked her with finding him a
girlfriend — actions that she interpreted as sexual advances.

Behind the scenes, Cuomo conceded that he had been “stupid” to engage in any
personal conversations with a female staffer whom he barely knew: “I should have
said, ‘This is fucking trouble.’” Still, he denied any malintent.

Like others on the team, I began to feel a sense of unease — the allegations
were at the very least creepy and they showed extremely poor judgment. Aides
from his early days as attorney general and governor were especially dismayed.
One told me, “I’m in disbelief. He used to have a rule about never being alone
with a woman in his office under any circumstances. Now he’s having these sorts
of conversations with a 25-year-old? What the hell is going on up there?”

We had been told there would be no additional allegations, but here was this one
— above-the-fold on the front page of the New York Times. It didn’t feel like we
were getting the whole truth. And that was a big problem, not least because the
number one rule of crisis communications, the most sacred rule of crisis
communications, is that the person in crisis needs to be completely truthful
with the people advising them. To give good advice, we had to know what other
potential stories were out there.

Fool me once, shame on you.

When it was known that a current employee of the governor’s office had hired a
lawyer and was claiming that the governor had groped her at the Executive
Mansion, Andrew Cuomo wanted to go after her character head-on: “If I don’t
fight back, why don’t I just resign?” | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures

We swallowed our doubts and tried to help Cuomo weather the storm.

Politicians had survived worse allegations of sexual misconduct — most notably,
Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. On the other hand, there was Senator
Al Franken, who stepped down from office in 2017 after several women came
forward and accused him of unwanted touching and kissing — accusations that
Franken disputed. But Democrats — including some of Franken’s colleagues who had
called for his resignation — had regrets about how it all went down, questioning
whether he’d received adequate due process. The complicated politics of the
#MeToo debate reached a fever pitch with the media circus around Supreme Court
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearings, which Democrats like Senator Claire
McCaskill of Missouri blamed in part for their losses in the 2018 midterms. The
hearings spurred a backlash with voters who believed that #MeToo was being
unfairly weaponized for political ends.

Andrew Cuomo resigns amid sexual harassment scandal

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In our internal conversations, we talked about the lessons from the Franken and
Kavanaugh controversies. However, the case study we looked to the most had
nothing to do with sexual harassment or misconduct: It was the curious case of
Governor Ralph Northam in Virginia. In February 2019, a right-wing blog
published a photo from Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook, which they
alleged showed Northam hamming it up in blackface next to a classmate wearing a
Ku Klux Klan costume. Northam’s handling of the incident didn’t inspire a ton of
confidence. First, he apologized. Then he denied he was in the photo at all,
even as he admitted that he’d once worn blackface in a Michael Jackson dance
contest. He refused to leave office.

But then a bizarre thing happened: Poll after poll showed that Black voters —
the constituents political prognosticators were certain would be the most
offended by the photo — believed, by a large margin, that he should stay in
office. And he did. A year later, his job approval rating soared to 60 percent
among all voters.

Lis Smith's Any Given Tuesday is available from Harper on July 19, 2022. |
Harper

The decision was made. Cuomo would “Northam it.” He called for due process and
authorized the New York attorney general’s office to conduct an independent
investigation into the sexual harassment allegations. He held a press conference
to make his case directly to the people of New York — one that was carried live
by local TV networks across the state and every national cable news network.

We prepped for the press conference at the Albany governor’s mansion. A group of
10 of us hunkered down in the poolhouse behind the main house — feet away from
the shallow hot tubs where Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as governor, had exercised
his polio-stricken legs.

Everyone was on edge and exhausted. There was one main exception: the governor.
He showed up to the prep session as cocky, casual and self-assured as ever. He
made small talk and cracked jokes. Outside of the seemingly never-ending stream
of Nicorette that he popped into his mouth, jaw tensed, you’d never have known
that he was under any sort of stress.

I led the prep, looking him in the eyes as I peppered him with questions about
his conduct. “Have you ever acted inappropriately toward women in the
workplace?” No. “Have you ever had inappropriate relationships with women on
your staff?” No. “Do you think other women will come forward?” No. Other
advisers jumped in with questions and received the same forceful feedback.
There’s no way he would just lie to all of our faces, we concluded. What kind of
person would do that?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A week later we got word of new allegations — the most serious and shocking yet.
The Times Union was working on a story about how a current employee of the
governor’s office had hired a lawyer and was claiming that the governor had
groped her at the Executive Mansion.

What. The. Fuck. That’s the only way to explain the reaction among the advisers,
especially the women. It started to feel like we were being manipulated — used
because of our gender to cover and lie for Cuomo.

“This is disgusting, right?” I asked his former communications director, who was
also advising him from afar. “Did you see any of this?”

“No, it’s so disgusting,” she told me. “I don’t even know what this is.”

Another adviser was even more direct in a call with me: “He is dead. Dead. We
just need to figure out how to land this plane.”

It was tempting to cut the cord right then and there, but instead we waited
until we heard directly from Cuomo himself. Again, everything followed a similar
rhythm. Within a couple of hours, Cuomo was on the phone with us vehemently
denying the allegations. There was one key difference. I heard something I’d
never heard in the governor’s voice before — fear. Genuine fear. “This is not
true. It never happened,” he told us.

In real time, we could hear the most powerful person in the state of New York
beginning to process that he was in real trouble. He wanted to come out guns
a-blazing against the accusations. “Bad Andrew” — as staff privately called him
when he got into his darkest moods — was making a comeback.

He wanted to accuse his accuser of having financial motivations. He wanted to
expose her for hiring a notorious Albany-area ambulance chaser. He wanted to go
after her character head-on: “If I don’t fight back, why don’t I just resign?”
It took the force of everyone on the call to talk him off the ledge and convince
him how disastrous it would be to go that route. We pleaded with him to show
some humility and contrition.

If Smith didn’t wrap up a call with a resolution, Chris Cuomo would usually end
it with, “Andrew, pick up your phone. I’m calling you after we hang up.” Chris
would get his brother to agree to the direction laid out by the cooler heads
around him. | Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

The person who finally got him to back off was an unlikely participant on our
calls: his brother, the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Chris was oftentimes the last
bulwark against his brother’s worst instincts.

While Chris could sometimes be a dick to staff and informal advisers, reminding
us: “I work in the media, you don’t” or “I know this business, you don’t,” he
was far from the goon he was portrayed to be in the media coverage that
ultimately led to his firing. He could be more direct with Andrew than any of us
could be. He leveled with him on calls, telling him in no uncertain terms that
his behavior was inappropriate, that he needed to be more apologetic and that he
could never, ever come across like he was attacking his accusers. If we didn’t
wrap up a call with a resolution, Chris would usually end it with: “Andrew, pick
up your phone. I’m calling you after we hang up.” And he’d get his brother to
agree to the direction laid out by the cooler heads around him.

I didn’t fully understand the dynamic between them. When I asked about it, one
of Andrew’s longtime advisers told me how he felt the governor had lost his way
a bit after his father, Mario, had passed away. According to the adviser, Andrew
had become less aware of how he treated other people, and Chris had supplanted
Mario as a ballast for him in that regard.

Whatever Chris said that day worked. Andrew ultimately backed down and delivered
a significantly more muted rebuttal to the allegations, essentially denying them
and asking New Yorkers to allow the outside investigation to conclude. It was
one of the last calls we’d have as a group — no more allegations came out
publicly, the AG investigation had started to move quickly and, truthfully, most
of us felt pretty burned by the whole situation. The accusations had gotten
increasingly more troubling: None of us were OK with enabling anyone who could
have done such things.

People have asked me why I stuck around and continued to advise him, even after
I started to have doubts about his conduct and the things he was telling us.
It’s not like I was totally blind to the fact that political figures could lie
or let me down. I’d seen the worst of politics up close. But I’d also seen the
best of it. There was never a day that I showed up to work for Pete or was on a
call with him when I doubted his truthfulness or sincerity. Pete had redeemed my
faith in the political process and reaffirmed why I’d chosen this line of work
in the first place. I wanted to believe Cuomo, I had to. To me, the other option
was unfathomable: that so much of what I’d done in politics, everything I’d done
for Cuomo, was in vain. That I was just another sucker, another cog in a
nihilistic machine.

There was also the fog of war that came with being in the middle of a crisis of
that magnitude. Every day, it felt like there was incoming that needed an
immediate response — allegations of misconduct, calls for him to resign,
editorials scorching him. The thought process was, “How can we get him through
this?” not “Should we help him get through this?” I should’ve ruminated on the
second question more.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I didn’t hear from the governor for a number of months. He ran with the Northam
playbook in the meantime. Every week that spring and summer, you could find him
holding a press conference with Black clergy, community leaders and elected
officials. Among the New York political constituencies, they were the most
willing to appear publicly with him.

A statewide survey that Andrew Cuomo's pollster had conducted found that Black
and women voters were the most likely to give him the benefit of the doubt. |
MediaPunch/IPX/AP Photo

The governor reached out in June, when he received a briefing of a statewide
survey that his pollster had conducted (it found that Black and women voters
were the most likely to give him the benefit of the doubt). Then he reached out
again in July after he’d been interviewed by investigators for the attorney
general report. He called a small group of us into his office and was positively
giddy about the interview: “Good news, gang,” he told us. “I sat down with Joon
Kim and Anne Clark [the AG’s investigators] and there’s going to be nothing new
in the report. It will just be a rehash of everything from the spring.”

He wanted to map out a prebuttal to the AG report, which he assured us would be
an underwhelming document. On the docket? A letter from his attorneys contesting
the objectivity of the investigators and a video, whose script he’d written out
himself — a script that clocked in at over 12 minutes. It was vintage “Bad
Andrew.”

The letter, which I suspect wasn’t drafted by his lawyers, included ad hominem
attacks against the AG’s investigators and the previous U.S. attorney from the
Southern District of New York. “Diary of a Psychopath” is how I described it to
another adviser.

The video script, if possible, was even worse. It included a long section that
he intended as a photo montage, where he’d show photo after photo of him kissing
people of all ages, races, sexualities and genders on the face. “Governor, you
should not do this,” I told him. “Unless you want this video to be mocked and
replayed on the late-night shows.” There wasn’t an adviser in disagreement. The
difference now, however, was that Chris, the governor’s brother, had fully
extricated himself from all conversations regarding the governor. There was no
one left who could close the deal with him.

For Lis Smith, Attorney General Letitia James’ report was the last in the line
of crushing blows. | Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

In the end, none of it mattered. The AG called a last-minute 9 a.m. Tuesday
press conference on August 3, where she released the findings of the report. My
stomach dropped when I read the new bombshell finding from a 30-year-old female
state trooper who’d served on the governor’s security detail for the last two
years. She told investigators that he had touched her inappropriately on
repeated occasions and made comments of a wildly inappropriate sexual nature to
her on the job — a job where she was tasked with protecting his life with hers.

Once again, he’d looked us all in the eyes and lied. Once again, he denied the
charges and wanted to fight them. The difference this time was that no one
around him believed him anymore, myself included.

Even after the fateful call when we’d told him that his career was “over,” he
tried to press on. He called each of us individually to ask our opinions,
seeking a sympathetic ear or some way out of the situation he found himself in.
He didn’t find one. The sole exception was former President Bill Clinton, who
told him that he needed to go out and address the people of New York directly:
to state that his fate was in their hands, not the politicians’. The consensus —
among advisers, at least — was that unless Clinton, with his legendary political
skills, was willing to do the mea culpa himself, it would do more harm than
good.

For me, the AG’s report was the last in the line of crushing blows. I’d been
willing to overlook Cuomo’s rough edges and obvious flaws — he’d done so much
good in his 11 years as governor, and I’d seen plenty of the warm, caring side
of him. But everything about the last several months had made me question my
sanity and judgment. It made me wonder why I’d committed my life to a profession
that was seemingly dominated by narcissists and liars. Every high I’d had had
been matched by an even bigger low.

The untold story of the dozens and dozens of people who didn’t merit an audience
with the New York Times, Lis Smith says, is of the lower level staffers who
worked for the former New York governor. | Office of the New York Governor via
The New York Times/ Redux Pictures

Within days, the man who had dominated Albany for the last 11 years and been
floated as the next coming of the Democratic Party, announced his resignation.

“Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” —Stephen King.

Cuomo’s resignation wasn’t the end of the whole affair. Not even close. It
triggered a tsunami that destroyed everything in its path. The collateral damage
was almost unfathomable.

There was Time’s Up — the Hollywood-backed, post-#MeToo nonprofit that fully
dissolved within weeks of the AG report’s release (its CEO and a board member
had given behind-the-scenes advice to Cuomo). Then there were the former aides
who were forced out of high-profile gigs — the president of the Human Rights
Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the country, and the chancellor
of the 420,000-student State University of New York, among others. Chris was
fired from hosting the top-rated show on CNN. And just two months later, CNN
Worldwide’s president, Jeff Zucker, was pushed out of his role, in part, for
crossing journalistic lines in his own relationship with Andrew.

Those were the firings and resignations that made the headlines. But there was
also the untold story of the dozens and dozens of people who didn’t merit an
audience with the New York Times — the lower level staffers who worked in
policy, intergovernmental relations, operations and different state agencies.
They put up with a tough, sometimes toxic workplace because working in the
office of the New York governor was a badge of honor. It was something they
could be proud of and it would obviously lead all of their resumes.

Overnight, that was taken from them. Some lost their jobs, others were denied
opportunities that they should’ve been given — all because of their association
with Cuomo. But it wasn’t just what they lost, it was all the things they’d
never get back — the years they’d wasted in his office, the life events they’d
missed and the personal relationships they’d strained due to the demanding
nature of working for him.

Within days of the AG report's release, Andrew Cuomo, the man who had dominated
Albany for the last 11 years and been floated as the next coming of the
Democratic Party, announced his resignation. | Seth Wenig/AP Photo

Once again, I became a target in the press for my proximity to a man acting
badly. On my worst days, I convinced myself that I’d reversed all of the
professional gains I’d made in the last few years. Luckily, that wasn’t the
case. But it was excruciating to go through.

Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, but he died as he lived: with zero regard
for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them.

This story is an adapted excerpt from Any Given Tuesday © 2022 by Lis Smith,
forthcoming from Harper on July 19, 2022.

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