A former Albany state house reporter is now the seventh woman to publicly accuse Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment – and on Friday provides details of unwanted poignant and humiliating comments she endured while defeating his government.
Jessica Bakeman says she has been sexually harassed by Cuomo several times since the start of her journalism career in 2012.
In a first-person piece for New York Magazine, she described a Christmas party in 2014 where the governor grabbed her tight as she went to say goodbye to the evening.
“He took my hand, as if to shake it, and then refused to let go,” Bakeman wrote. “He put his other arm around my back, his hand around my waist, and held me firmly in place as he indicated to a photographer he wanted us to pose for a photo.”
Bakeman, who was 25 at the time and working for what is now Politico New York, said red flags were going up as her “job was to analyze and investigate him.”
“I didn’t want a picture of him with his hands on my body and a smile on my face,” she wrote. But I made the reflexive assessment that most women and marginalized people instinctively know, the calculation of risk and power and self-preservation. I knew it would be much easier to smile for the brief moment it takes to take a picture than it would be to challenge one of the most powerful men in the country. “
Months after her professional career, Bakeman claimed that Cuomo put his arm around her shoulders while telling stories with her male colleagues at a party in the Executive Mansion for an outgoing communications consultant.
“He left it there and pinned me next to him for a few minutes when he finished his story,” she recalls the alleged incident in 2012 while working for USA Today. “I stood there with hot cheeks giggling nervously as my male colleagues did the same. We all knew it was wrong, but we didn’t do anything. “
In the years that followed, “ Cuomo never lets me forget I was a woman, ” Bakeman continued, saying that he once mocked her for having a purple phone – instead of answering her question at a press conference – and humiliated her again in 2014 , then she shouted at a press conference about her male colleague, Ken Lovett, a former Post Albany reporter who was then working for the Daily News.
“’I just love how you keep your mouth from Ken Lovett, to tell you the truth,” Cuomo told her at the time, Bakeman wrote.
She added: ‘Cuomo seemed to find the fact that I had the guts to speak about a man hilarious. For him, these exchanges were always intended as a public humiliation. “
Bakeman said she knew Cuomo never wanted to have sex with her.
Instead, “it was about power,” she wrote. “He wanted me to know he could take away my dignity at any time with an inappropriate comment or a hand on my waist.”
The reporter, who now works in Florida, said there is a marked difference in the way Cuomo treats her male colleagues.
“The way he bullies and humiliates women is different,” she said. He uses touch and sexual innuendo to arouse fear in us. That’s the textbook definition of sexual harassment. “
The three-office Democrat is facing growing calls from his own Democratic colleagues to resign over the string of allegations of sexual misconduct.
The case will be investigated by Attorney General Letitia James in New York, while the state assembly on Thursday approved an investigation into possible impeachment.
Cuomo has vehemently denied the allegations – and has so far refused to step down over what he sees as “ canceling culture. ”