Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that he regretted his decision to resign as governor of New York in 2021 in the face of sexual harassment allegations, suggesting that he and perhaps the state would have been better off had he stayed in office.
“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have resigned,” Mr. Cuomo said in a sit-down interview with The New York Times.
“At the time, I thought that I would be a distraction to government functionality, that they would all be involved in impeachment proceedings, blah, blah, blah,” he added. “Looking back, what has really been done in the past four years anyway, right?”
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who apologized for making women “feel uncomfortable” at the time, also said he now believes he could have fought to clear his name more quickly had he stayed in office and subjected himself to an impeachment process in the State Legislature.
The comments offered one of the clearest windows into Mr. Cuomo’s thinking since he began a comeback campaign for mayor of New York City in March. They came in a wide-ranging conversation just ahead of the first Democratic primary debate this week.
Mr. Cuomo, 67, is considered the prohibitive favorite in the June 24 contest, despite running a low-key campaign heavy with baggage from his 10-plus years as governor.
Allies say the Democrat has spent years ruminating about a return to elected office, but Mr. Cuomo asserted on Monday that he decided to enter the race only because of growing concerns that New York City, under its current leadership, would perhaps never regain the footing it had lost during the Covid pandemic.
“I was done. I was in the private sector, just enjoying life,” he said. “But then I was looking at what was happening in New York City. You saw Mayor Adams getting into trouble. You saw Trump coming. So, I’m worried about New York City.”
Responding to Mr. Cuomo’s apparent dig at his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a spokesman for the governor said that Mr. Cuomo’s campaign agenda reflects many of her priorities.
“We know Mr. Cuomo appreciates Governor Hochul’s work holding the line on income taxes, fixing the bail laws, fighting crime, building housing and prioritizing affordability,” said the spokesman, Avi Small.
Mr. Cuomo declined to share information about the companies and individuals who paid him as a consultant in the time after he left office, maintaining a stance he has adopted throughout his mayoral campaign. Mr. Cuomo has disclosed that he earned at least $500,000 in 2024 from consulting clients, but has masked their names.
In the interview, he suggested the matter was out of his hands, saying he was acting as a lawyer. “A lawyer can’t disclose,” he said.
It is not clear, however, that Mr. Cuomo is bound by attorney-client privilege. The firm that he used for his client work, Innovation Strategies, was incorporated as a strategic consulting company, not a legal firm. In the case of two clients that have become public in media reports — a cryptocurrency exchange and a nuclear energy startup — Mr. Cuomo does not appear to have been working as a lawyer.
A third project that Mr. Cuomo pursued, which has not been previously reported, appears to have been even farther afield. The former governor sought to help his friend and former employer, the real estate investor Andrew L. Farkas, as he tried to build a luxury marina on a decommissioned military base in Puerto Rico.
The project stalled, though, and Mr. Cuomo said he was never paid.
“It sounded like a very cool project, and I looked into it a little bit,” he said. “But it didn’t go anywhere.”
A representative for Mr. Farkas, a friend of President Trump’s, confirmed that account.
The interview was not the first time that Mr. Cuomo expressed regret for his decision to resign as governor. He told Bloomberg News as much in February 2022, scarcely six months after his resignation, and recently repeated it in a podcast interview with The Free Press.
Still, it is a noticeably sharp turnabout from what he said in the summer of 2021, and comes at a time when voters must decide whether they want him back in public office.
Mr. Cuomo resigned after a report he had requested from the state attorney general’s office found he had “sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees” in an office “filled with fear and intimidation.”
During his resignation speech, the governor expressed contrition for being “too familiar with people,” but denied the most serious allegations. He said he was resigning to avoid creating a distraction.
But he almost immediately went to work in court and in the news media trying to clear his name. He ultimately spent millions of taxpayer dollars on legal fees.
Mr. Cuomo now says that none of the dozen or so accusations against him ever had merit. His opponents, and many of the women who accused him, vehemently disagree.
State Senator Liz Krueger, who has endorsed the city comptroller, Brad Lander, in the Democratic primary, said she found it “pretty disturbing” that she had not heard more soul-searching from the former governor.
“There was nothing that forced him to resign other than — I believe, but perhaps I’m wrong — his own recognition that what he did was beyond the pale of acceptable for someone claiming to be the governor of New York State,” she said.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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