New York | The US attorney general has dropped charges of sexual assault against former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo before he appeared in court in a case in which a backlog of testimony forced the powerful Democratic official to resign last August.
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While the testimony of the plaintiff, David Soares, Albany’s attorney general, was deemed “credible,” in a statement Tuesday there were insufficient elements to prove Andrew Cuomo’s guilt in court “beyond reasonable doubt.”
The former governor was due to appear for the first time in court in Albany, the state capital, on Friday, but the attorney general indicated he was unwilling to pursue the charge and asked the county mayor to withdraw his complaint.
In this case, he was accused of “forced touching” of an employee, by passing his hand under her blouse to touch her chest, on December 7, 2020 at his official residence in Albany.
Within weeks, he became the third attorney general to drop similar charges against the former Democratic leader.
Andrew Cuomo, the 64-year-old governor who had been indicted for several months by former employees, resigned on August 11, a week after the publication of a damning investigative report listing the cases of 11 women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted.
An astonishing fall for this descendant of Italian immigrants, who have ruled the country’s fourth state (about 20 million people) since 2011 and was aspiring to a fourth term in 2022. His father Mario Como led the state from 1983 to 1994.
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At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when New York was the epicenter of the American earthquake in the spring of 2020, Andrew Cuomo was named the national star, by his daily press briefings.
His downfall also led to the downfall of his brother, CNN reporter Chris Cuomo, who at the end of November was expelled from the channel for his elder advice in a storm of accusations of sexual harassment and assault.