New York Attorney General Letitia James began releasing hundreds of pages of transcripts from the investigation into sexual harassment allegations against former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The release of the transcripts, which will happen “on a rolling basis”, is part of “an effort to provide full transparency to the people of New York”.
The transcripts include interviews with former Gov. Cuomo, who resigned from his position back in August, as well as 10 of the women who have accused him of misconduct. Those 10 women include Lindsay Boylan, who became the first to step forward with accusations in a series of tweets in December of 2020.
“As I’m walking out [of a meeting with Cuomo], he steps kind of in front of me and kisses me and it happened so fast, it was the weirdest thing,” Boylan said in her interview. “I just kept walking because my first thought is ‘oh my god, oh my god, what if someone saw that and they’re going to think that I wanted a kiss from the governor’.”James also released the transcripts from an interview with Brittany Commisso. She is believed by some to be behind the criminal complaint filed against Cuomo last month. The complaint accused Cuomo of forcible touching, saying he put his hand under a woman’s shirt on Dec. 7, 2020.
“I remember his hand just sliding right up my blouse. And I remember looking down and I remember seeing his hand which is, I would say a large hand and over my bra,” Commisso said in her interview. “I remember looking down and being like, excuse my language, ‘holy s***, this just like went from zero to 60 in .2 seconds’. It was so fast.”
In transcripts of his interview, Cuomo insisted he was careful in how he behaved around women and said several of his accusers had misrepresented what happened. He also addressed Commisso’s accusation, saying it would be “not even feasible” for him to have done that.
“I would have to lose my mind to do some — such a thing. It would be an act of insanity to touch a woman’s breast and make myself vulnerable to a woman for such an accusation,” Cuomo said in his interview.