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Cuomo Comforted Them During COVID. Now They See A Conspiracy To Destroy Him
By
Jake Offenhartz
Published Mar 2, 2021
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Governor Andrew Cuomo's Office
By
Jake Offenhartz
Published Mar 2, 2021
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As a lifelong Ohioan, Kathy Warg never paid much attention to New York politics. Then the coronavirus came to the United States, and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings began appearing on MSNBC almost every morning. “He was my lifeline,” the 69-year-old widow told Gothamist. “He took the reins when we didn’t have White House representation.”
Warg soon discovered a community of fellow Cuomo devotees on Facebook. She became an administrator of the People for Gov. Andrew Mark Cuomo — one of several pro-Cuomo fan accounts created in the last year — helping to carefully screen the group’s more than 1,500 followers for sufficient pro-Cuomo loyalty. Members swapped daily aphorisms, necktie reviews and memories from their favorite briefings. Posts about the “negative stuff,” according to Warg, were quickly deleted.
As Cuomo now finds himself embroiled in a deepening sexual harassment scandal, his most dedicated online supporters say they’re prepared to “hold down the fort” in defense of the third-term governor. They have launched counter-offensives on social media, unleashing a barrage of hashtags in the replies to tweets referencing the alleged harassment. Increasingly, many of them have adopted a QAnon-style conspiracy theory that casts the governor's accusers as agents of Donald Trump.
“It’s the first thing most everyone that I know has thought: the Trump Organization or someone associated with him is behind this,” Warg said on Monday. “To me it’s just common sense.”
The baseless conspiracy holds that Trump and the Russians are working in tandem to derail the governor, as part of an effort to stop the Manhattan District Attorney’s prosecution of the former president. That incorrect belief has taken root among some dedicated Cuomo supporters, even as the list of allegations against him grows longer.
On Monday night, Anna Ruch, 33, accused the governor of making an unwanted advance on her during a wedding in 2019. That account followed allegations in recent days from two former aides: Lindsey Boylan, who said the governor had kissed her without consent during a period of repeated harassment between 2016 and 2018; and Charlotte Bennett, a 25-year-old former executive assistant who alleged that Cuomo asked her several uncomfortable questions last year, including whether she would have sex with older men.
The Governor’s Office has denied Boylan’s allegations, claimed that his comments to Bennett were misinterpreted, and not yet commented on Ruch’s account. Cuomo's spokespersons did not respond to Gothamist’s inquiries for this story.
Kristen Vaas, an upstate New York resident, attributed the alleged acts to the governor being “single and lonely.” Like Warg, she’d joined a close-knit group of online Cuomo supporters early in the pandemic — most of them Liberal women in their 50s and 60s, she said, who have “kind of bonded over this” on Twitter. She now spends roughly 3 to 4 hours per day tweeting in Cuomo's defense, she said, and recently joined a wave of others who’ve changed their photo in support the governor.
“I don’t recall ever hearing anything bad about him. It seems like it's just stuff that’s happened recently,” Vaas told Gothamist. “Some of the conversations I’ve had with like-minded supporters on Twitter, we’re wondering if maybe Donald Trump has something to do with this.”
The emergence of the Cuomo conspiracy makes sense, given his rise to national prominence during the pandemic’s most traumatic days, according to Dannagal Young, an associate professor of communication at the University of Delaware who studies misinformation.
“For folks who were following Cuomo's press conferences through the spring, they were made to feel comforted,” Young said. “Conspiracy theories are also about our emotional and psychological needs.” She worried that the claim, while nonsensical, could produce a “chilling effect in terms of people’s willingness to come forward.”
In a statement released on Sunday, the governor urged people against contacting the accusers, noting they had “heard anecdotally that some people have reached out to Ms. Bennett to express displeasure about her coming forward.”
Framing criticism of the state as the work of shady right-wing actors has long been part of the Cuomo administration’s playbook. Among his senior staffers, questions about the governor’s power — from his use of emergency orders to his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic — are frequently waved off as a narrative advanced by “bots.”
As he faced growing pressure over the latter scandal last month, Cuomo acknowledged that the lack of data transparency had created a void, which he claimed was “filled with skepticism, and cynicism, and conspiracy theories which furthered the confusion.”
For many of his most adamant defenders, the connection between the nursing home scandal and the recent accounts of harassment and bullying amount to a winding conspiracy being waged against a man they credit with helping them survive the worst days of the pandemic. One Twitter user — who uses the display name Always stand up for Justice — said she feared that Attorney General Letitia James, who released a report on nursing homes earlier this year, and will soon appoint an investigator to probe the harassment allegations, had become a pro-Trump asset.
Reached by phone, the woman described herself as a 61-year-old Democratic activist living in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She said she was previously forced out of a job in the fashion industry due to harassment, and empathized with young women who go through similar experiences. “I’ve been in the workplace and I’ve been harassed and nothing was done because there were no laws, it was the way it was,” the woman, who declined to provide her full name, said.
Still, she maintains the allegations against Cuomo are lies cooked up by the former president. She said she had spent the weekend rallying others to “hold down the fort” — by posting dozens of times per day in an effort to discredit the “roaches” who’ve come forward with complaints against Cuomo.
“We are people who remember the truth, who remember what our governor did for us,” the woman told Gothamist. “I can smell a political game a mile away.”
Tagged
sexual harassment
Cuomo
andrew cuomo
Cuomo in Crisis
Jake Offenhartz
Jake Offenhartz is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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