CUOMO ACCUSERS FIGHT EFFORT BY FORMER GOVERNOR TO CLEAR HIS NAME
KAITLIN MOODY JOINS LINDSEY BOYLAN AND CHARLOTTE BENNETT FIGHTING CUOMO SUBPOENAS FOR PHONE RECORDS, TEXTS, TESTIMONY
Kaitlin Moody via The Catskill Project.
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Three of the women Attorney General Letitia James claimed were sexually harassed byAndrew Cuomo are blocking the former governor's attempt to clear his name.
Kaitlin Moody joined Cuomo's first accuser, Lindsey Boylan, and Charlotte Bennett, his second, in a bare-knuckle courtroom brawl breaking out in Brooklyn Federal court this week. The trio is fighting to block subpoenas from Cuomo for the womens' phone records and text messages. Cuomo also subpoenaed the women to answer questions under oath.
Cuomo's legal team has also subpoenaed phone records and testimony from former-State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, as previously reported by The Free Lance. Biaggi has not yet formally contested the subpoenas issued to her in court.
The subpoenas come in a federal lawsuit brought by an anonymous State Trooper alleging Cuomo sexually harassed her. The female Trooper is only identified in court filings as "Trooper 1."
Trooper 1 alleges not just that Cuomo sexually harassed her, but that he sexually harassed other women, including Moody, Boylan and Bennett. Trooper 1 cites the three womens' allegations in her legal complaint in a total of 34 paragraphs. Her lawyers will likely seek to call the women as corroborating witnesses if a trial is held in Trooper 1's lawsuit.
Because they're named in Trooper 1's lawsuit and are potential trial witnesses, Cuomo has the right under Federal court rules to obtain what is legally known as "discovery." The law allows both sides in a lawsuit to demand the other side hand over phone records, text messages of potential witnesses and any other relevant evidence. It also allows questioning under oath in a "deposition."
Boylan and Bennett already asked the federal judge overseeing Trooper 1's lawsuit to "quash" or cancel the subpoenas Cuomo’s legal team sent them. Boylan seeks to quash a total of at least eight subpoenas, according to court records.
Moody seeks to join the effort and squash subpoenas issued to her.
Zoe Salzman, Moody's lawyer, says she shouldn't be subpoenaed because she's "not a party to this case or any case. She does not know Trooper 1, has never communicated with her, and did not even work for Cuomo at the same time" he allegedly harassed Trooper 1.
James' report claimed Moody was sexually harassed by Cuomo, but she swore under oath to James' investigators "I never said that the Governor sexually harassed me."
Moody Tweeted support for Boylan after Boylan first accused Cuomo of sex harassment in a Dec. 13, 2020 Tweet. The two crossed paths during their time in state government.
"I believed her," Moody told James' investigators. "I just got worked up and angry with the Governor again and tweeted in support of Lindsey saying that I believed her."
Boylan contacted her regularly by phone and text after that.
"She would send articles," Moody said. "She would check-in. She would ask if I remembered an event."
Boylan also put her in touch with journalists. Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker magazine and Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine were two of the journalists Boylan put her in touch with. Moody called them their "PR team."
"She would ask if I would speak to—there was a PR team, maybe they weren't a PR—ask if I would speak to Ronan and Rebecca or I can't remember his name, some other guy," she revealed to James' investigators.
Moody was identified as Kaitlin in Traister's bombshell report accusing Cuomo and his Administration of "cruelty" and "chronic mismanagement" published Mar. 12, 2021. Traister also took time out from reporting to preach against what she characterized as "brute white patriarchy."
Moody admitted compiling a list of the names of 14 women. Moody believed the 14 women on her list had either been sexually harassed by Cuomo or were sleeping with him because they wanted to.
"I could see a world where that is true," she said.
Moody gave her list of 14 names of women to Traister and investigators from the Attorney General's office.
She also fished around at Farrow’s request for more alleged victims.
“I asked people because Ronan had asked me and I wasn't going to give Ronan a story and so I was trying to be helpful,” she explained. But then Moody “saw a tweet talking about respecting people's privacy and I recognize that what I was doing was not right.”
List of 14 womens’ names compiled by Kaitlin Moody. Photo Credit: New York State Attorney General’s office.
Moody was also identified only by her first name in the Attorney General's indictment-like 165-page report that forced Cuomo's resignation on Aug. 10, 2021. However, Moody was named-in-full in a public document submitted to the State Assembly Judiciary Committee and published online by the New York Daily News in 2021. (Embedded below.)
Moody's story starts dramatically in 2016.
That's when Cuomo almost literally swept her off her feet at a political fundraiser held at the Friar's Club in Manhattan on Dec. 12. She told James' investigators she was working as a lobbyist at the time for Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron, and an online public database confirms it. Moody says Cuomo was on his way out of the club after giving a speech when he stopped to "say thank you, to say bye, work the room."
Moody stepped up and introduced herself, she said.
She told Cuomo she worked for then-Rep. Joe Crowely—a 20-year Democratic party powerbroker dethroned two years later by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in one of the biggest upsets of the 2018 midterm elections.
"At the time, he's still a Congressman," Moody told James' investigators.
Cuomo "grabbed me—held onto my hand and then said that he was going to have me work at—at the state level and then we took these photos," she said.
Crowley’s name is censored in the redacted transcript of Moody’s deposition published by the Attorney General. Crowley’s link to Moody, and thus Cuomo’s fate, is reported here for the first time.
Crowley did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Kaitlin Moody and Andrew Cuomo meeting for the first time. Photo Credit: New York State Attorney General’s office.
Cuomo told James’s investigators his people asked Crowley’s people about Moody and they said she was “a superstar.” A Cuomo aide called Moody and invited her to interview for a job as an administrative assistant a few days later. When she went back to the office of the lobbying firm she worked for, her colleagues told her she had to take the job.
"They all said, you know, unfortunately, he's going to poach you and we--you—you have to take the job," she said. "Everybody told me that I had to take the job."
Crowley, Moody’s political mentor, and his chief-of-staff AnneMarie Anzalone, told her she had to take the job with Cuomo—despite the fact it was going to be challenging.
I had a very frank conversation with them about how we knew why he was hiring me and it was because of what I looked like. The—they said that the Governor is known to be a very tough person to work for and the environment is very difficult and I made the comment that I wasn't going to sleep with the Governor and they said no, that you should not do that and I said okay, great. We're on the same page.
Moody worked as an aide to Cuomo for a year before she was transferred to another state agency.
She told James' investigators Cuomo nicknamed her "sponge," called her a "lumberjack" once for wearing a plaid shirt, made her order car parts on the internet bent over in front of him and stood "very close" to her a few times, violating her "personal space."
"I wasn't afraid," she clarified. "Nervous, maybe. Uncomfortable, but I wouldn't say I was afraid."
Cuomo never kissed her or tried to kiss her—like Trooper 1 says Cuomo did to her.
"To my recollection, he never kissed me," she told James investigators. "Is it possible he did that Italian thing, maybe, I—no, I don't think the Governor ever kissed me in any way."
Crowley, Moody’s political mentor, gave a radio interview an hour after Cuomo announced his resignation. He never mentioned that one of Cuomo’s accusers was one his own former aides—much less admit he told her she “had” to take the job with Cuomo back in 2016.
"No one, I think, foresaw that with the governor,” Crowley claimed in the 2021 interview.
Referring to his own forced exit from politics after losing to Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 primary election, Crowley suggested a competition with Cuomo as to which one ended their political careers better.
“I would take losing an election any day over having to resign from office, certainly under this cloud,” Crowley crowed.
Today Moody sells multi-million dollar houses in the Catskills.
Salzman, Moody's lawyer, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
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