I’m not one for tabloid news, I really don’t care about what the “main stream media,” the MSM, has to say about anything.
Sure I listen to the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal on Audible. And no; I’m not getting any kick backs for the mention, though I wouldn’t mind if I did. But when I find a story that interests me, that’s when I go deeper. I mean, I will read every book about the subject.
The MSM story about the so-called “Love Gov” had my attention.
I was disappointed to hear that the DOJ decided not to pursue investigation of the nursing home Covid deaths in New York State because of a very ill-fated decision made by Gov Cuomo - a story that has now fallen off the radar only to languish in the form of smaller state and other local courts cases in perpetuity. This Bleak House style legal development truly saddens me.
The deaths of thousands of New York's elderly due to a policy decision is one of the stories of the decade, IMHO. Trust me, unless you are subscribed to some legal blotter for the New York state courts, you are not going to hear anything more about their deaths in the MSM. Ever. Again. It is what a journalist friend of mine has called a, “fifth page newstory.”
Still, I was heartened to hear that a full investigation of Gov Cuomo's alleged sexual harassment behavior was completed by a reputable group of attorneys and other staffers.
As I listened to some of the highlights of that report the facts made me cringe.
It takes a lot to make me cringe.
Though I've not been against the #Metoo movement, I have, to the consternation of my staunch feminist friends, been very critical of it. But my criticism has nothing to do with women who may (or may not) be victims of sexual harassment. Rather than "believe all women" I think we should "trust but verify." My concerns are related to how #Metoo has often been used as a political weapon to obfuscate larger and more serious problems, and I thought that this could be the case here.
According to an NBC report filed on August 6, 2021 (Source: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/what-we-know-about-executive-assistant-1s-allegations-against-cuomo/3206765/):
The report says the behavior included, “close and intimate hugs; kisses on the cheeks, forehead, and at least one kiss on the lips; touching and grabbing of Executive Assistant #1’s butt during hugs and, on one occasion, while taking selfies with him; and comments and jokes by the Governor about Executive Assistant #1’s personal life and relationships, including calling her and another assistant “mingle mamas,” inquiring multiple times about whether she had cheated or would cheat on her husband, and asking her to help find him a girlfriend.”
Ultimately, in November 2020 the Governor’s behavior escalated when he hugged the woman and then allegedly reached under her blouse and grabbed her breast, according to the report.
The report says, “Executive Assistant #1 kept this groping incident to herself and planned to take it “to the grave,” but found herself becoming emotional (in a way that was visible to her colleagues in the Executive Chamber) while watching the Governor state, at a press conference on March 3, 2021, that he had never “touched anyone inappropriately.”
When I was young and pretty, I didn’t care too much about my secretarial/job skills. Since I came of age in the 1980s - a time when the mastadons roamed the earth freely - I had my share of #Metoo moments. Oh I may have avoided the casting couch and the presumptive “dinner date” that others have experienced, but I had been chased around quite a few executive’s desks in my wild and crazy youth.
And, truth be told, I loved it…but I have to admit it was scary sometimes to get on by my looks, my youth, and charm.
Yes, I was a charming and fetching lass - but no longer.
That, as anyone with a thimblefull of common sense will tell you, will only get you so far.
And, this was long before the words “sexual harassment” was in anyone’s lexicon. Oh, yes, it was a thing, I mean, it was in the opinion of Sandra Day O’Connor in the Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson decision - a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 1986 - that coined the phrase in legal circles, but it really didn’t become A Thing until the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle back in the 1990s. And, of course just a couple of years after that #MeToo moment, we were told that we had to #Moveon from the fact that one of our past Presidents had his aide wearing some sort of blue dress, give him fellatio on (or was it under?) the same desk that D-Day was planned.
Yeah, it’s been nearly 30 years and I still can’t “unsee” that damn blue dress.
Eventually, I got married, and thanks to gravity and the negative experience I had being married to a man who thought he was entitled to everything life had to offer him including, but not limited to, me supporting him through his doctorate program in Criminal Justice Studies (yes, I got to meet Derek Bell at a faculty party, but that is a story for another time) at a land grant university out west, I finally got down to business.
So I went back to school and, tossing aside my liberal studies and all of those wonderful erudite things I had been trained to say at select and tony dinner parties that I never seemed to get invited to. Instead, I found myself getting into economics, marketing, finance and accounting. It turned out that I really liked the “business world” as we girls - yes, 2nd wave feminism or not, we were still girls - called it. (I’ll have more to say about being kicked out of the feminist movement in later posts. Don’t worry, it won’t be long before I starting kvetching about that subject!)
It was a little too late for me to enter into the high stakes game of the corporate world. At that time in history, the “business world” didn’t want you for their management programs if you were over 25 years of age, or if you weren’t an attractive minority (note the use of the singular “a minority”) who had graduated from a top tier school. The corporate world didn’t want to mold anyone who had traveled the world and could quote Shakespeare sonnets by heart and who had just turned 30. Maybe it’s different now, but I doubt it.
Me, I had finished my second college degree in business administration at a small liberal arts college that had its classes on the weekends. I graduated with honors, but the only currency the sheep skin could grant me was a “diversity” interview. Also, I didn’t have enough experience saving companies money. I had no accomplishments to speak of. I was only fit for a commissions based job as a sales woman. But I needed real benefits and a steady stream of income. I worked as a legal secretary through my degree program. And a legal secretary with a degree in business and a certificate in paralegal studies made me marketable. Though I didn’t type as fast as the other girls, I saved and collected a lot of money for my bosses over the years. I became adept at computers, and was an early adopter of MicroSoft Office. Recruiters loved me.
But it was an evolutionary process for me. I never had any ambitions early in life. I just wanted to make enough money to live on and support my habits of high minded culture, and my pretentions as an artist. I never thought, never in a million years that I would become, a secretarial machine.
Though now I am old and quickly approaching the winter of my years, I have finally come to terms that though I worked very very hard to help my executives and attorneys - someone else - get rich. And no; I am not bitter about that. I learned a lot and am grateful that I had the opportunities that I had. It’s just that once I reached my late 40s, I could go no further and was stuck in a rut. I had become trauma bonded and golden handcuffed to my benevolent employer, who after 12 years, ushered me out the door without so much as a “thank you.”
Like so many others whose careers reached their ignomious ends during the height of the great recession, I had topped out. I had become “expensive.” Kind of like Kodak.
That’s the short version of the story.
Flash forward several years and here I am - still working - still assisting. I assist a Judge right now and love the fact that I am working for the biggest bureaucracy ever!
So, when I heard in the news that former New York State Governor Cuomo was pinged for sexual harrassment, I took a break from my work, I looked down my trifocals and clicked the link that took me to the story.
And it was the allegations (really, do I have to call them allegations?) of Executive Assistant No. 1 that broke my heart.
Candidly, in the all of the years, shit decades, I worked as a staffer in employment law, and the number of sexual harassment cases I assisted (there’s that verb again) my attorneys in litigating - it is rare to see such perfect textbook examples of the kind of toxic sexual harassment and bullying that occurred in the New York State's Governor's office. What really creeped me out was how the victims were retaliated against and threatened by men (and women) who valued their career ambitions over and at the expense of the law.
What made me really depressed was the fact that here I was an old secretary - that, had I been alive during the Holocaust, I would have been the only one in Herr Schindler’s company’s steno pool that knew how to type only to be tossed aside for the younger prettier ones who couldn’t tell the difference between a qwerty keyboard and a bottle of gin.
And yet, here we are, nearly a century later from Herr Schindler’s booty call, and nothing, and I mean nothing, has changed in the business/political world.
Executive Assistant No. 1 did not get her EA job because she had the skills, the intelligence, the moxy to work for such a gruff and demanding boss. No. She got the job because she looked cute when she picked up the pencil from the floor.
I know that’s harsh, and believe me I don’t want to bash EA#1 at all for she has my unwaivering support. Her allegations tipped the scales of Justice in the right direction. She was considered “beliveable” by the investigators after all.
But it is a sad reminder that in life, as in politics and anything else, there aren’t any happy endings.