Joining me today is Lindsey Boylan, who in 2021 was the first of several women to accuse former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. Cuomo would eventually resign, under collective pressure from Democrats at the state and national level. Now, Cuomo is running for mayor of New York, where he’s leading in most polls. This might seem a shocking turn of events in a reality where Donald Trump — a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist — hadn’t just returned to the White House, but Lindsey isn’t sitting silently while Cuomo stages a comeback. She’s doing everything she can to stop it.
Edited excerpts from our conversation:
SER: I know I was surprised, perhaps naively so, when Cuomo resurfaced. What was your reaction at the time when you learned he was running for mayor?
LINDSEY: You know, I wasn't surprised. I knew he would resurface. His entire kind of reason for being is in politics. I don’t think he knows any other way of being. And I don’t think the staff that has stayed loyal to him have any other interests than seeing him back in power. So I knew that he would attempt this, this self renovation, reputation washing.
I was initially surprised that he did decide to run in New York City’s mayor’s race. I think it just shows you what degree to which our city is in crisis of leadership because he candidly, to my experience, hates New York City. He hates being in the city. He spent as much time as he could away from it when he was governor.
He doesn’t like to be accountable to people. And there’s no place more seriously taken than the mayor’s office and how he or she has to be accountable to the citizens of the city, whether or not they like it.
So, I was shocked that he ultimately jumped in. I knew he was going to rear his ugly head and try to come back into power. And I don’t think if he had any other option, if there was even an inkling that he could take on [Kathy] Hochul and the governor’s mansion, he would do that first. This is a last resort.
And it’s because he views Eric Adams as floundering. So I think it says more about that than it does any interest he has in actually helping the city. In fact, he spent most of his career taking resources away from the city, using the city and its leaders as political leverage, and trying to diminish the mayor of New York City throughout his tenor in Albany.
I don’t think he’s particularly intelligent from a policy standpoint. He’s not particularly focused, ethical, and none of these things is he known for. He is known for being shameless and also a tactician of how to weasel his way into power. He managed his dad’s campaigns once upon a time. That is his upbringing. And so I think he’s made the calculus that people will not remember and not be focused on him in this election and simply think about their unhappiness with the current mayor and equate him to someone who’s going to take on Trump.
Of course, on that front, he hasn’t taken on Trump in any meaningful way in his career. And in fact, they share a donor base at this point. He’s also more conflicted than Eric Adams is in terms of potential legal jeopardy. Eric Adams had this cloud hanging over him of potential prosecution that New Yorkers.
But Cuomo has actually been referred for criminal prosecution by the COVID Select Committee. He’s also been found to be responsible for harassing 13 women more than what either the [New York] attorney general or the Assembly’s report said, by the Department of Justice.
There are all these realities that are pretty widespread and associated with the Department of Justice, associated with the federal legal system that he could be very easily co-opted by Trump if he were to get in the mayor’s office. So that’s really important to remind folks.
The challenge is how do you get past this name that people don’t even necessarily associate with him? They think about his dad. They think about the last name and it’s just there. And how do you remind people of all of his bad deeds, all of the ways that he's screwed New York City over at the same time that we elevate, one of these five good apples that, or all five good apples that you should rank for mayor instead.
SER: And you have been helping folks understand what the options are, who the other candidates are, because if it was Cuomo and Adams, that’s pretty bleak, but there are ways to rank the rank the other candidates so that Cuomo doesn’t win.
LINDSEY: People got to rank five. We’ve got to rank five. I was thinking about how to deal with this, particularly since ranked choice voting is kind of new to me and we all just had it in the last mayoral election.
You’re going to get to rank five people for mayor. And the first thing to do is make sure you don’t rank Cuomo so that he doesn’t get any of your votes.
He doesn’t get your first vote. He doesn’t get your second round vote. He doesn’t get your third round vote. He can’t get any of those if you want to keep him out of the mayor’s office. And instead, what you have to do is five good apples.
My good apples in no particular order are Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Adrienne Adams, and Jessica Ramos. Now, again, those are not in order at this point. There may be a point in the election primary where I specify a little bit more.
But the reason for that is how ranked choice voting works is there will be a first round of votes. So whoever you voted for first will get that one vote and the lowest vote getter as you go forward gets taken out of the process. And so whoever your next vote for the next round was goes to that second candidate.
So essentially, you will have a process where even if your favorite first person is one candidate, you’ve got to think about the fourth vote you did and the fifth vote you did.
Because it is going to likely make it to that fifth round where it’s going to matter who your next candidate vote was for. And you do not want to be in a position where if you only rank Brad or you only rank Zohran, for example, and somehow one of those candidates isn’t in one of the later rounds, you have no say any longer who’s going to be the mayor.
And I will say when you’re running against someone with such a big name like Andrew Cuomo, these other candidates need to have this month to make sure we know who they are, who everyone knows who they are. So you can prioritize how you want to rank them, but they’ve got to do that job. They’re running against someone who has 100 percent name recognition. So you absolutely have to keep him entirely off your ballot and rank five people who you can live with being mayor.
You can find Lindsey at Instagram (@lindseyboylanny) and Bluesky (@lindseyboylan.bsky.social). Her video testimony against Andrew Cuomo is devastating but important to watch, especially if you are New York City voter.
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