Tag: sexual harassment

Taxpayers to Cover Andrew Cuomo’s Defense in Sexual Harassment Lawsuit

Taxpayers will be left footing the bill to defend disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in his sexual harassment lawsuit.

Nearly a dozen women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, leading to his resignation in August 2021.

Cuomo was sued by a State Trooper last year, who alleges that he hit on her, kissed her, and “placed the palm of his hand on her belly button and slid it across her waist to her right hip.”

According to a report from the New York Post, “the former governor claimed the sex harassment accusations were made while he was governor — entitling him to a state-funded defense.”

A lawyer with the Attorney General, Andrew Amer, said they had denied the taxpayer-funded defense because “all of the conduct was to serve [Cuomo’s] own self-interest.”

“These are not allegations where the conduct occurred while they were off duty. These are work place allegations,” Cuomo’s lawyer argued.

On Friday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shlomo Hagler sided with Cuomo.

“This court grants the petition and requires that there be a defense,” Hagler said.

“[Cuomo’s] view is that everything he did was within the scope of his employment and he was just acting as the governor … when addressing trooper 1 in a friendly manner,” Hagler continued. “Did he go over the line? That is not clear cut.”

The judge said that since Cuomo has denied the allegations and claimed that he was acting appropriately as the governor, a taxpayer-funded defense can’t be denied.

“The allegations are quite disturbing,” Hagler said. “They should not be tolerated in the work place, if true.”

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A top Border Patrol official resigned after allegedly pressuring female employees for sex, officials say

A top official at the U.S. Border Patrol abruptly resigned in October after allegations came to light that he pressured a subordinate employee to perform sexual favors, and other women have since made similar allegations that they were victimized by him, say three Department of Homeland Security officials. 

Tony Barker, who served as the acting chief of the law enforcement operations directorate for the Border Patrol, is now under investigation for his behavior by Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the three officials say. 

According to the sources, one woman said she had a consensual relationship with Barker that she tried to end, prompting Barker to retaliate. Barker allegedly threatened to tell others that she had illegally issued contracts if she did not perform sexual favors.

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DOJ Probed Tara Reade’s Twitter After She Issued Allegations About Joe Biden’s Sexual Harassment, Docs Show

The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a subpoena probing Twitter for information on Tara Reade’s accounts in 2020 months after she issued allegations about being sexually assaulted by President Joe Biden in 1993, documents obtained by the Daily Caller show.

The DOJ asked Twitter to testify before a grand jury on Dec. 16 of 2020 and provide “all subscriber information” from Reade’s accounts, according to emails and subpoena documents obtained by the Caller.

The subpoena shows that Twitter was asked to provide information on two of Reade’s Twitter accounts, including @ReadeAlexandra and @TaraMcCabe.

The requested information included the accounts’:

  1. Subscriber name;
  2. Address;
  3. Records of session times and durations, to include attempted/failed/unauthenticated logins;
  4. Length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;
  5. Telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and
  6. Means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number)

The DOJ, Twitter and Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Twitter for the subpoena, did not respond to the Caller when asked to verify the authenticity of the subpoena.

Reade said she doesn’t “know why” her Twitter accounts were of interest to the FBI.

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Three Wisconsin Middle School Boys Hit with Title IX Sexual Harassment Complaint for Calling Non-Binary Classmate by Wrong Pronouns

Three Wisconsin middle school boys were hit with a Title IX sexual harassment complaint for refusing to refer to a non-binary classmate by ‘they/them’ pronouns.

Three 8th graders at Kiel Middle School are under investigation for refusing to capitulate to a so-called ‘non-binary’ student’s demands.

Title IX covers rape, dating violence and quid pro quo sexual favors.

Attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argue that Title IX doesn’t cover the misuse of pronouns and neither do any of the school district’s policies.

WLUK reported:

The school district has filed a Title IX complaint against the Kiel Middle School students, accusing them of sexual harassment for using incorrect pronouns when addressing another student.

I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,” Rosemary Rabidoux, one of the parents of the students being accused said. “I immediately went into shock! I’m thinking, sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest. What has my son done?”

Rabidoux’s 13-year-old son Braden is one of the three eighth-grade Kiel Middle School students accused of sexual harassment — something she disputes.

“(The investigating principal) said he’s being allegedly charged with sexual harassment for not using proper pronouns,” said Rabidoux. “I thought it wasn’t real! I thought this has got to be a gag, a joke — one has nothing to do with the other.”

According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), now defending the accused students, in March, one of their peers announced the pronouns they’d prefer to be addressed as — they/them.

One of the alleged incidents Braden and the others were supposedly involved in happened in late April.

“She had been screaming at one of Braden’s friends to use proper pronouns, calling him profanity, and this friend is very soft-spoken, and kind of just sunk down into his chair,” Rabidoux explained. “Braden finally came up, defending him, saying ‘He doesn’t have to use proper pronouns, it’s his constitutional right to not use, you can’t make him say things.’”

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Britain may outlaw catcalling

Pestering women on the street and in bars could soon become an offense as part of an overhaul of laws to protect women against violence.

Loopholes in current laws mean there is no specific offense for sexually harassing women verbally in the street.

Now a Government-commissioned review will next week call for public sexual harassment and inciting hatred against women to be made criminal offences, reports The Telegraph.

The proposed change is part of a push to outlaw “public sexual harassment”.

However, calls for misogyny to be made a hate crime will be rejected — as it’s thought it be ineffective, according to sources.

A Whitehall source told the paper: “The Law Commission is not going to class misogyny as a hate crime because it would be ineffective and in some cases counterproductive.

“But it will call for a public sexual harassment offence which doesn’t currently exist.

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How China Managed to Wipe Out All Mentions of Its Most Explosive #MeToo Case

Hours after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former Communist Party official of sexual assault in a shocking online post, Eric Liu witnessed one of the most intensive censorship campaigns carried out before his eyes. 

The process looked familiar to Liu, who worked as a content censor at Weibo, the microblogging site where Peng described how former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before the two entered into an on-and-off affair. But the scale was unprecedented, the 34-year-old said, due to the shocking nature of Peng’s story, the sheer number of people on social media, and the Communist leadership’s growing desire to keep public opinion under control.

“It is an extremely grand-scale campaign,” said Liu, who quit the company in 2013 and is now tracking Chinese censorship for China Digital Times from the United States. “There is nothing that could be compared to this. Although more serious political events have taken place in the past, the internet censorship was not that strict. I would expect them to use their full capacity to carry this out.” 

The Communist Party leadership regards any scandal involving its core members as a threat to its rule. Since Peng’s post came out, Beijing has sought to wipe it out from the country’s history by banning media coverage, requiring around-the-clock human efforts from social media companies, and, through a system of punishments, coaxing citizens into self-censorship. It has demonstrated the country’s ability to keep its cyberspace insular even as the case was making international headlines every day. 

The goal is to make Peng’s accusations taboo, just like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, so even those who have read the post would avoid talking about it, letting the incident recede from memory and lose its significance as China’s biggest #MeToo case.

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Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women in violation of state and federal law, NY AG finds

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that her office’s investigation into sexual harassment allegations against Gov. Andrew Cuomo has concluded and that they have found that Cuomo indeed sexually harassed multiple women.

The attorney general’s probe, which included interviews with 179 people, found that Cuomo harassed current and former staff members from 2013 to 2020.

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CNN acknowledges Chris Cuomo joined his brother’s strategy calls on sexual harassment accusations

CNN acknowledged Thursday that anchor Chris Cuomo joined strategy sessions with his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the wake of sexual harassment accusations against him, through a statement to the Washington Post.

Why it matters: Although CNN said Cuomo has not been involved in the outlet’s coverage of the allegations, the calls detailed by the Post show that the anchor advised his brother’s staff on how to respond to the accusations — which “cuts against the widely accepted norm in journalism that those reporting the news should not be involved in politics,” the Post writes.

What they’re saying: “Chris has not been involved in CNN’s extensive coverage of the allegations against Governor Cuomo — on air or behind the scenes,” the network’s statement to WashPost reads. “In part because, as he has said on his show, he could never be objective. But also because he often serves as a sounding board for his brother.”

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