A former assistant believes that during a one-on-one meeting in his Albany office last year, Governor Andrew Cuomo “tried to sleep with me,” according to a TV interview aired Thursday night.
During a segment broadcast on the “CBS Evening News,” Charlotte Bennett, 25, was asked by anchor Norah O’Donnell what she thought when Cuomo, 63, asked her about her sex life on June 5.
‘I thought he’s trying to sleep with me. The governor is trying to sleep with me and I feel very uncomfortable and I have to get out of this room ASAP, ”Bennett said.
“Why did you think he was trying to sleep with you?” O’Donnell asked.
“Without explicitly saying it, he… he suggested that I was old enough for him and that he was lonely,” Bennett said.
At one point, O’Donnell asked Bennett if Cuomo was likely “encouraged” by all of the “national attention” he received from his televised coronavirus briefings.
“Absolutely. I think he felt he was untouchable in many ways,” she replied.
Bennett also told O’Donnell that she had no doubts about Cuomo’s motives.
“Do you believe he proposed to you?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yes,” replied Bennett.
“For what?” O’Donnell asked.
“Sex,” Bennett replied.
Bennett said Cuomo’s questions about her sex life include, “whether the age difference mattered.”
“He also explained that he was okay with someone over the age of 22,” she added.
In an earlier conversation on May 15, Bennett recalled, Cuomo seemed fixated on her history of surviving sexual assault.
So he goes, ‘You were raped. You have been raped. You have been raped and assaulted and abused, ” she said.
A second part of the interview will air Friday on “CBS This Morning,” and O’Donnell previewed this during a performance on the local CBS-2 News at 5pm.
O’Donnell said Bennett “says that Governor Cuomo is, in her words, a textbook abuser” and “even uses such words that she was groomed for this relationship.”
Bennett is one of three women whose allegations are the subject of an investigation by an independent law firm to be appointed by Attorney General Letitia James.