A former top aide to Andrew Cuomo claims the New York mayoral candidate once gave an inappropriate, under-the-dress massage to a 72-year-old grandmother who told him to stop.
Karen Hinton, who herself accused the former New York governor of making an unwanted sexual advance toward her when he was working in the Clinton administration in 2000, made the allegation Friday on her Substack.
Hinton, one of several women who have accused Cuomo of misconduct, explained that she used “inaccurate dates, names, and places to protect the woman and her family featured in this story.”
According to Hinton, Cuomo in 2007 visited the mother of a mutual friend of his and Hinton’s husband. This woman had contacted Cuomo to help her son, who was battling drug addiction.
Hinton writes that Cuomo, who was 49 years old at the time, at one point suggested that a foot massage would help with her stress.
When the woman, a grandmother who was then 72, said it was “not necessary at all,” Cuomo insisted.
“Please,” Cuomo said, according to Hinton. “Let me make things easier for you, at least for a few minutes.”
Hinton writes that Cuomo removed her shoes and massaged her feet.
She continues:
She felt uncomfortable but Cuomo, she later said, was helping Tom, and she didn’t want to offend him.
Except.
Cuomo’s hands moved up higher from her feet. Onto her calves. Then above her knees, nearing her thighs, under her dress.
“Stop, Andrew. I don’t know what you are thinking, but stop. You should leave now,” she said.
He apologized. His massage, he said, didn’t mean what she thought it meant.
Uh, huh, she thought. “Go home. Grow up,” she said.
The woman told her son what had happened, and she ultimately dissuaded him from confronting Cuomo.
The woman, now 90, “doesn’t want to talk about it at all,” Hinton writes.
Cuomo denies Hinton’s account.
“It’s disgusting untrue garbage from an unwell fabulist who invented so many lies about the governor she was able to fill a book, which somehow omitted this gross tale, that nobody bought because her claims defied believability,” a campaign spokesperson told the Daily Beast in a statement, adding that Hinton “lies and slanders the governor when she wants attention.”
Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021 after an investigation by the New York attorney general found that he had sexually harassed 11 women while in office, including by groping, kissing, and making sexual comments. Cuomo has denied the more serious allegations, admitting that he had been “insensitive or too personal at times.”
All charges against him were ultimately dropped.
In her piece, Hinton made clear that she doesn’t support Cuomo’s bid for office. Having lost the Democratic primary last month, Cuomo is now running as an independent.
“Cuomo will call me a liar again, that I made this up, that it’s a political ploy to further demean his reputation. If he says I don’t want him to be mayor, he would be right about that,” she writes.
“I have a daughter and two stepdaughters living in New York City,” she goes on. “They know how expensive it is to exist in a place they now call home. They want a mayor who will make their city more affordable and will treat women with respect, not just with a kiss or a touch on the breast or stomach, or a massage at any age, young or old.”
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