In Andrew Cuomo’s 515 pages of sworn testimony, the former governor defended his behavior and denied touching anyone inappropriately.
Over the course of an 11-hour deposition, Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to make a few things clear. He was the type of governor who often showed concern about the well-being of his employees, both male and female, as well as their romantic lives and their health.
He said that yes, he often kissed and hugged staffers, allowing that if any inappropriate touching occurred, it must have been “incidental.” And he wanted to make sure that the questioners knew that he believed they were carrying out a “biased political investigation,” and that those leading it had a yearslong vendetta against him.
But an entirely different view of Mr. Cuomo was offered by the multiple women who accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual misconduct. One female state trooper said she felt “completely violated” after Mr. Cuomo had touched her back and stomach inappropriately. And when Mr. Cuomo offered her a private tour of the Executive Mansion, she sensed a different purpose.
“He tried to be flirtatious,” the trooper testified. “A lot of times, it came off creepy.”
The starkly disparate depictions of Mr. Cuomo were revealed on Wednesday in a trove of testimony and documents from a New York State attorney general investigation that eventually concluded that Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women.
The state attorney general, Letitia James, released a 515-page transcript of Mr. Cuomo’s sworn testimony from July and interviews with 10 women whose allegations formed the basis of the report that led to Mr. Cuomo’s resignation in August, as well as more than 800 pages of evidence, including emails, text messages, photos and his daily schedules.
Taken together, the material offered a kaleidoscopic overview of the accusations that fueled Mr. Cuomo’s demise along with a detailed perspective on his often combative defense of his conduct. It also included a raw retelling by the 10 women of instances when they said Mr. Cuomo made lewd remarks or inappropriately kissed them or touched them.
Some of the documents illustrated how Mr. Cuomo’s team strategized to combat the allegations early on. In one email from February, for example, Mr. Cuomo’s top aide prepared a list of 12 questions that Mr. Cuomo could be asked about Lindsey Boylan, a former state economic development official who was the first woman to accuse him of sexual harassment.
Ms. Boylan said that Mr. Cuomo had harassed her on several occasions from 2016 to 2018, at one point giving her an unsolicited kiss on the lips at his Manhattan office.
Among the “Q’s to practice” were whether Mr. Cuomo had kissed Ms. Boylan or touched her; asked if she wanted to play strip poker; or ever had “inappropriate relationships with women on your staff.”
The reams of testimony are likely to serve as a road map for Mr. Cuomo and his lawyers in their continued attempts to undermine the findings of the attorney general’s 165-page report, released on Aug. 3, and to offer narratives that counter the allegations.
“These transcripts include questionable redactions and raise even more questions about key omissions made during this slanted process, which reeks of prosecutorial misconduct,” Richard Azzopardi, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, said on Wednesday. “The more we know about this investigation, the more we know what a fraud it was.”
Mr. Azzopardi also released a list of 10 questions he said Ms. James should respond to about the investigation.
Mr. Cuomo’s personal lawyer, Rita Glavin, had clamored for weeks for the release of the transcripts, arguing they would prove the report was riddled with inaccuracies and crafted to fit a predetermined narrative about Mr. Cuomo.
She described the evidence released on Wednesday as a “slow-rolling and selective disclosure,” noting there were plenty of other transcripts and documents that have not been made public and adding that “this has never been about fairness or due process.”
The transcripts took on critical importance after the former governor was charged in late October with forcible touching, a misdemeanor, in a criminal complaint filed by the Albany County sheriff’s office. The case, which centered on accusations that Mr. Cuomo groped Brittany Commisso, a former aide, in the Executive Mansion in Albany last year, was thrown into question last week after local prosecutors said the sheriff’s complaint was “defective.” Mr. Cuomo is nonetheless due in court in January.
Ms. Commisso’s allegation — that Mr. Cuomo grabbed her breast while they were alone in his residence, the culmination of other unpleasant encounters — was among the most serious made against the governor and has resulted in the most damaging fallout. Even though the attorney general report had included excerpts from her testimony, the 218-page transcript released on Wednesday put Ms. Commisso’s emotional toll on stark display.
“If I were to do anything as in say something or slap him across the face, I was going to be escorted out by state police and definitely probably fired,” Ms. Commisso said, explaining why she never confronted Mr. Cuomo. “I knew that I was going to get into trouble and not him. So I took it.”
Mr. Cuomo forcefully pushed back against her allegations, suggesting it defied belief that he would engage in such behavior after years in public life.
“That never happened,” he said to investigators. “At one point there has to be a little reality. To touch a woman’s breast who I hardly know, in the mansion, with 10 staff around, with my family in the mansion, to say ‘I don’t care who sees us.’”
The attorney general also released testimony from an unnamed female state trooper from Mr. Cuomo’s security detail, who described two incidents that were included in Ms. James’s report.
She said Mr. Cuomo ran a finger down her spine while she stood in front of him in an elevator in Manhattan. In September 2019, while she was holding open a door for him, he also pressed his hand on her stomach and ran it over to her hip, she said.
“I felt like, completely violated because to me, like that’s between my chest and my privates, which, you know, if he was a little bit north or a little bit south, it’s not good,” the trooper told investigators.
“I kind of like, compartmentalized,” she said. “It happened, I felt uncomfortable, I felt completely violated. But, you know, I’m here to do a job.”
The trooper also said that a senior member of Mr. Cuomo’s protective detail told her that he had seen the governor “making out on the sidewalk” with one of his senior aides, and that “everyone kind of assumes or thinks that there’s something going on between them.”
Mr. Azzopardi said that the trooper was relaying “rumors she heard but said that she had never seen such behavior, and that is because it never happened.”
He said that the inclusion of the trooper’s account of what she had heard about Mr. Cuomo and the senior aide was evidence of “more politics and prosecutorial misconduct from Tish James.”
Mr. Cuomo told investigators that he kissed his aides on the cheek “as a general rule,” instead of on the lips, but added that there might have been an occasion when a staff member kissed him on the lips.
“That’s what some people do,” he said. “Never a romantic kiss — right? We’re just talking about a peck on the lips.” (In the report, Annabel Walsh, a former staffer, recalled having kissed Mr. Cuomo on the lips, but said that she did not find the kisses uncomfortable.)
Mr. Cuomo seemed to oscillate between cheeky replies and domineering retorts, frequently following up investigators’ questions with questions of his own. One such instance included an elongated exchange about the definition of “girlfriend.”
In many instances, however, Mr. Cuomo told investigators he could not recall whether he had kissed someone, touched someone or said something in particular, or when a certain encounter had taken place. Mr. Cuomo repeated the phrase “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall” more than 180 times during his testimony.
He often struck a confrontational tone with one of the investigators, Joon H. Kim, a former federal prosecutor who had investigated Mr. Cuomo’s administration in the past and whom Ms. James hired to help lead the sexual harassment investigation earlier this year.
In one instance, Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Kim that he had a “predisposition” and that his hiring amounted to “a perversion of fair.” At another point, Mr. Kim asked Mr. Cuomo about reports that a state trooper was dating one of his daughters, prompting Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer to ask why that was relevant.
Mr. Cuomo interjected: “It’s relevant because this is a biased political investigation as we know. And that’s what it is. That’s why it’s relevant. So go ahead.”
Mr. Cuomo’s response foreshadowed his now oft-repeated public stance, in statements and in emails to supporters, that the investigation was orchestrated by Ms. James to further her political ambitions.
Ms. James, who has denied those assertions and dismissed Mr. Cuomo’s repeated attacks as “more of the same,” announced on Oct. 29 that she was running for governor against Gov. Kathy Hochul, who ascended to the state’s top job after Mr. Cuomo resigned.
Ms. James, a fellow Democrat, said she had held back on releasing the transcripts at the request of local prosecutors who were determining whether to criminally charge Mr. Cuomo.
That changed when Mr. Cuomo was charged with the misdemeanor, and the Albany district attorney’s office informed her office that it would begin releasing the evidence in order to comply with the state’s discovery laws, which dictate that criminal defendants be provided transcripts and other evidence in their case.
Ms. James, who said her office would continue to release more evidence on a rolling basis, added that the release marked “an effort to provide full transparency to the people of New York.”
Reporting was contributed by Grace Ashford, Jonah E. Bromwich, Nicholas Fandos, Michael Gold, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Sarah Maslin Nir, William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser and Karen Zraick.
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