WHY DID CUOMO CALL ME?

My Two Hour Conversation with the Ex-Governor

In May of 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was called America’s most popular pol. Fifteen months later he exited in disgrace as one of its most reviled. Comforter-in-Chief to Predator-in-Albany.

He slipped away and went radio silent for five months. Until he called me three weeks ago.

That call, for a reporter anyway, was both a great “get” and a miserable conundrum. I felt like the demon love child of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. It was a “Why, me?” for getting the call. A bat-wielding, un-Woke witch — for writing about it in this political climate. But I’m a reporter. I expect that.

What I didn’t expect was that none of the usual mainstream media for whom I’d been writing since Jesus was in swaddling Pampers, wanted an exclusive interview with his side of the story.

I would have had an easier time pitching an interview with a serial killer.

Maybe the narrative everybody already had, was the narrative everybody wanted.

Perhaps I should have guessed it would go that way — but still it was a shock. After all, it was hardly a blip in the news when the last of the 11 charges against the former governor for harassing, hugging, kissing, groping and grabbing women’s backs, butts and breasts — had been dismissed.

This phone call from the former governor was clearly a first attempt to undo what may be the undoable damage caused by the release of the devastating redacted testimony by the women and witnesses involved in each case. But some of the newly un-redacted transcripts reveal more of what witnesses and victims actually did say occurred in each case. Those transcripts present a clearer, albeit ugly, tale of sex, lies and audiotape. And it is all in there in the limited transcripts that Attorney General Letitia James recently released.

What He Told Me

“This is a setup and I know it’s a setup,” Cuomo told me right off. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years.” He claimed that the AG’s independent investigation was anything but independent. “James could not do the investigation herself, so she appoints two investigators. Joon Kim, who who has hated me for years…