For a politician yearning for a path back to power, the deal that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo struck to start his own podcast in 2022 looked almost perfect.
The show, “As a Matter of Fact … With Andrew Cuomo,” offered an uncensored platform to mend his reputation a year after he resigned in a sexual harassment scandal. He laughed with Sean Penn and Kellyanne Conway and dished “straight talk” about his party’s faults. There was talk of interviewing Donald J. Trump.
And the endeavor came with the promise of a big payday. Quake Media, a buzzy start-up known for its right-wing hosts, paid Mr. Cuomo as much as $40,000 a month, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.
But this was no star turn. Instead of launching Mr. Cuomo’s comeback, his foray into online media turned out to be the beginning of a protracted — and often humbling — misadventure that only ended this spring when he decided to run for mayor of New York City.
Mr. Cuomo, 67, has managed to keep most details about his podcasting career under wraps. But a review of previously unreported court records and interviews with a dozen people involved show the lengths he was willing to go to restore his name.
It began with Quake Media. But when the start-up began unraveling, Mr. Cuomo tried others in the Republican spectrum. He courted a conservative talk radio powerhouse and had a portentous run-in with a Republican rival in a familiar red beret. And, in a bizarre twist, the podcasts he made may soon be owned by a well-known Fox News host.
Powerful allies privy to the work said they could only guess why Mr. Cuomo was so determined.
“You are asking me to be his psychiatrist!” said John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of WABC, a conservative talk radio station where Mr. Cuomo tried to get on the air.
“But I think he wanted to stay relevant politically,” he said. “Once you are out of the media for a period of time, you become irrelevant.”
Mr. Cuomo now finds himself in a similar position. He is trying to salvage his career as a third-party candidate in the mayor’s race, in large part by courting Republicans, including Mr. Catsimatidis and his radio listeners.
For politicians who have been canceled, are washed-up or out of work, radio has long been a refuge. Mr. Cuomo knew the model well: His own father, Mario M. Cuomo, had briefly hosted a nationally syndicated radio show after leaving the New York governor’s mansion in the 1990s. His brother, Chris Cuomo, announced he was starting a podcast in the summer of 2022 after CNN fired him.
For Andrew Cuomo, Quake Media seemed an odd fit. For $4.99 a month, subscribers could get access to “exclusive” content from hosts that included Laura Ingraham, Soledad O’Brien, Mike Huckabee and Pete Rose as part of a novel “subscription podcast network,” where the shows were secured behind a paywall.
But Mr. Cuomo did not exactly have a lot of options. The company started paying him lump sums that would add up to close to $500,000 a year to produce a show every week or two. “As a Matter of Fact …” rolled out in fall 2022, billed as the Democrat’s big public re-emergence.
“I’m doing it because I’m worried about this country,” Mr. Cuomo said in the first episode.
An I-know-best politician who had spent his career sparring with journalists, Mr. Cuomo was not exactly a natural host. But he secured splashy guests and attracted attention by using the show to air longstanding grievances against Democrats in “denial” about the scourge of crime, against then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a recent but frequently cited foe, the socialist left.
Behind the scenes, Quake was unraveling. Unbeknown to Mr. Cuomo, the company had lost its corporate charter in May 2022, months before hiring him.
When it began missing contractual payments, Ms. Ingraham, better known for her work on Fox News, filed suit, saying the company owed her nearly $1 million. Ms. Ingraham’s lawyer declined to comment.
The company missed payments to Mr. Cuomo, too, according to the former governor.
In a wide-ranging interview in early June, Mr. Cuomo said the podcast had taken “the majority of my time” for the year or so he was on air and that he enjoyed the challenge of writing scripts. “I took it very seriously,” he said.
But Mr. Cuomo conceded the company’s founder, Doug Rosenberg, had stiffed him. “He was a nice enough fellow, and the economy sort of changed beneath him,” Mr. Cuomo said. “He has not paid me everything that I’m owed.”
“He said he will, he just needs time,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I said OK.”
Quake went dark in late 2023. Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, declined to say how much the former governor was owed.
James D. Bailey, a lawyer for Mr. Rosenberg, declined to comment on his interactions with Mr. Cuomo.
Mr. Cuomo did not, at the time, publicize his situation. Instead, he quietly looked for a lifeline.
Enter Mr. Catsimatidis.
A heterodox Republican who made his fortune off groceries and oil refineries, Mr. Catsimatidis also owned WABC, a talk radio station that he turned into a drive-time juggernaut. The station leans rightward, but it draws a large audience that centrists like Mr. Cuomo covet.
Mr. Catsimatidis said he could not remember exactly when Mr. Cuomo approached him, but the former governor made it clear in late 2022 or 2023 that he wanted to move to WABC.
“It wasn’t about money,” the owner said. “He thought he could get double the listeners.”
Mr. Catsimatidis consulted his team. They were not interested, three people involved at the time said.
Mr. Catsimatidis “didn’t think Andrew would be objective enough,” recalled David A. Paterson, Mr. Cuomo’s predecessor as governor and another WABC host. “He would use the mic to go after people that he felt slandered him.”
Others at the station voiced showmanship concerns. “Basically, I said to the techs, if ever he becomes a podcaster here, I’d want to impale myself with a microphone,” said Curtis Sliwa, a WABC mainstay who is now clashing with Mr. Cuomo as the Republican nominee for mayor. “The guy is boring!”
By Mr. Azzopardi’s account, the two sides did not come to terms and Mr. Cuomo “ultimately decided it wasn’t something he wanted to pursue.”
The former governor had started a lucrative parallel consulting business where he earned more than $500,000 in 2024, according to his financial disclosures to the city. Mr. Cuomo has refused to produce a list of his clients, though news media have reported he worked for an embattled cryptocurrency exchange and a nuclear power start-up.
But he did not completely give up on radio.
This winter, not long before he announced his campaign for mayor, Mr. Cuomo approached WABC again. This time, he said he was interested in producing a political podcast with Mr. Catsimatidis’s podcasting network, Red Apple.
The mogul was more receptive. Unlike an on-air show, Mr. Cuomo would be responsible for finding sponsors for a podcast, he said, and would have to share a cut of the revenue with Red Apple.
“He has access to a lot of people with — how do you call it — checks-appeal,” Mr. Catsimatidis said. (After initially supporting Mayor Eric Adams before he dropped his re-election bid, Mr. Catsimatidis has endorsed Mr. Cuomo.)
But the podcast idea fell apart, in no small thanks to Mr. Sliwa. When Mr. Cuomo came to visit Red Apple’s Midtown Manhattan studios, Mr. Sliwa was live on air.
Mr. Sliwa said that studio executives asked him to steer clear of Mr. Cuomo during the visit. He obliged — but decided to state his grievances on air. Mr. Sliwa used his show to accuse Mr. Cuomo of being responsible for the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents from Covid. (Mr. Cuomo denies wrongdoing.)
Mr. Cuomo was furious, according to Mr. Catsimatidis and Mr. Sliwa, and he left without a deal.
Mr. Azzopardi said Mr. Cuomo had “no recollection of that incident, but Sliwa is an insignificant part of our lives, and until the last debate Cuomo doesn’t remember ever meeting him.”
Now, as Mr. Cuomo seeks to prolong his political career, his brief career in radio may have an afterlife. Two years after she filed it, Ms. Ingraham’s case against Quake has advanced through the courts.
Earlier this month, lawyers for the host and Mr. Rosenberg filed a joint letter to a judge saying they were in advanced settlement talks to compensate Ms. Ingraham. A settlement, they wrote, “will likely include Quake’s intellectual property” — which includes Mr. Cuomo’s old shows.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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