When Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation as governor four years ago, he took time to compliment those who accused him of sexual harassment, even while taking issue with some of their accounts.
“I want to thank the women who came forward with sincere complaints. It’s not easy to step forward, but you did an important service,” he said in a 20-minute speech in Albany in August 2021. “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”
But before Cuomo approached the microphone, it became clear that he was ready to wield a sharper sword.
His attorney, Rita Glavin, spoke to the press for 40 minutes before him. Often by name, the former federal criminal prosecutor challenged the credibility of the 11 women who testified in the investigation overseen by the state attorney general and conducted by two outside law firms that led Cuomo to step down.
It was Glavin’s address, not the ex-governor’s, that foreshadowed what would follow.
A review by THE CITY of thousands of pages of court documents involving the most sprawling harassment suit that emerged against Cuomo paints a striking picture of how intensely his legal defense has come after any woman he sees as part of his downfall. And taxpayers have footed the bill, to the tune of $19 million and counting, under a state law that covers legal costs for public employees facing job-related suits.
In often tense court proceedings, Cuomo’s lawyers have repeatedly accused women whose accounts have been corroborated in multiple investigations of being liars and co-conspirators. Outside the courthouse, his attorneys and some family members have battled to rehabilitate his image by helping shred that of any perceived detractor they targeted.
The central legal battleground has been a federal lawsuit informally known as Trooper 1, named for its anonymous plaintiff, a former state police officer Cuomo handpicked to join his security detail. Trooper 1 testified in the attorney general’s investigation that while working for Cuomo, he queried her about her clothing choices and romantic relationships, asked to kiss her on two occasions and traced his finger along her spine while whispering in her ear “hey you,” in front of a colleague, making her “hot and nervous,” she said.
Through a spokesman, Cuomo disputed this. “The events in the Trooper 1 case have been distorted into something that they are not,” said Rich Azzopardi. “There was never sexual harassment, she was prompted to come forward and recast these incidents as something that they were not.”
More broadly, Azzopardi said: “The governor has consistently said he never harassed anybody and the attorney general’s report was pure politics.” He argued that the evidence gathered in the Trooper 1 case shows “it’s clear that these cases were a weaponization of the #MeToo movement for political purposes in some cases and a cash grab in others.”
Unlike the two other suits that have emerged against Cuomo, Trooper 1 referenced the other accusers’ accounts in the attorney general’s investigation, drawing the women into the case through subpoenas from Cuomo’s lawyers for voluminous documents and lengthy depositions.
His defense has requested years of their phone records, drafts of a book and a blog post, testimony about previous sexual relationships and an alleged sexual assault, as well as medical records. While Cuomo’s lawyers view their approach as standard, in interviews with more than two dozen lawyers involved in the case as well as outside experts, most told THE CITY they found the tactic troubling.
When lawyers for the potential witnesses have attempted to limit their clients’ exposure, Cuomo’s have aggressively rebuffed their efforts, leading to intractable disputes that suck up time and money as the case has dragged on for more than three years with little progress.
In a May 2 hearing, his lawyers dismissed the relevance of a potential witness’ trauma history cited to fight a deposition, discarding the opinion a medical professional filed to the court and drawing the condemnation of the judge.
“I am struggling here with the notion that there is any trauma that would be associated with sitting across the table in a conference room,” said Theresa Trzaskoma, an attorney for Cuomo. “The court should take the assertion that there is imminent risk of harm and toss it in the garbage can because it is not believable.”
The magistrate judge overseeing some of the proceedings, Taryn Merkl, cautioned the attorney to “tread lightly,” saying, “The notion that you’re asking me to disregard someone’s trauma response, I’m telling you I’m not going to do it.”
When Trzaskoma said the judge’s words suggested she may have some bias in favor of the witness, Merkl told her she was “going down a bad road,” adding: “having sympathy for a victim of trauma is human nature.”
Meanwhile, with no trial date in sight for the Trooper 1 case, its machinations have extended for so long that they challenge federal rules designed to give civil litigants their speediest and least expensive resolution, according to legal experts.
A tally by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office as of May 19 shows that taxpayers have spent $19.4 million to defend Cuomo and his staff in three cases brought by women who allege they were harassed. In just the Trooper 1 case, the defense costs have ballooned to $9.2 million. The bills from the three cases make up nearly one-third of what the state has spent in 249 taxpayer-funded defense cases since January 2020, according to figures from the office.
The costs and complexities of the case have grown not only because of the Cuomo team’s relentlessness, but as a result of a string of decisions by DiNapoli, Trooper 1’s lawyers and Merkl. They have helped form a perfect storm clearing a pathway for Cuomo’ lawyers to barrel down.
While the Public Officers Law requires the state to pay “reasonable attorneys’ fees” for a defense, DiNapoli’s office has said that as an auditor it doesn’t have the authority to interfere with Cuomo’s legal strategy. Trooper 1’s lawyers maintain the burden on the other women named in the suit lies with Cuomo’s litigation tactics and that including their accounts is critical to proving the hostile work environment claim central to its case. And while regularly criticizing the breadth of Glavin’s subpoenas — accusing her at one point of pursuing a “scorched earth” approach — Merkl has said in court it’s critical to give Cuomo the opportunity to prove his defense.
The result is a case that lawyers agree is in many ways unprecedented, wearing down and financially depleting not only women who have accused Cuomo of harassment and brought their own suits but others who never planned to enter a courtroom at all.
First Accuser to Foremost Target
After Cuomo resigned as governor, he faced a tough road to redemption. Investigators with the office of Attorney General Letitia James interviewed 179 witnesses and reviewed 74,000 documents, including texts, photos and emails. The interviews included detailed, sworn testimony from 11 women who described unwanted touching and repeated comments about their appearances and sexual references in their conversations. James said in a press conference, “I believe these women.”
Later reports from the state Assembly Judiciary Committee and the federal Department of Justice also found the allegations credible, with the latter identifying two more accusers.
The allegations weren’t of violent assaults that had marked the worst offenders of the #MeToo era like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. Still, they were significant under the state’s laws. In 2019, Cuomo signed legislation “ending the absurd legal standard that sexual harassment in the workplace needs to be ‘severe or pervasive,’” as he said in a speech at the time.
The law prohibits unwanted verbal or physical advances as well as sexually explicit remarks that cause someone discomfort or humiliation. Even one incident may be considered sexual harassment, and an employee is not required to file any complaint or grievance to establish liability, according to the legislation.
Cuomo has repeatedly disputed that he violated even the amended law. “In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” Cuomo said in his resignation speech, referring to generational differences.
Since then, Cuomo’s team has built a more full-throated defense of his conduct, insisting that the women and James, along with the outside investigators, have been intent on his downfall. “Based on what he’s learned, and we’ve learned in discovery now, he has a very, very different view of Trooper 1 now and what her motivations were,” Glavin said in one hearing.
Glavin has long been critical of the attorney general’s report, responding on the day of its release with an 86-page statement charging that it was a biased report and omitted key evidence. Later, she wrote to the office calling it “misleading, flawed, and unreliable.”
When it came to the women themselves, his team has frequently honed in, not on the woman suing him — Trooper 1 — but on Lindsey Boylan, the first aide to come forward. His lawyers have repeatedly accused her of lying and then convincing other women to exaggerate their accounts, according to THE CITY’s review of court filings.
“One of our defenses is that Ms. Boylan made this stuff up,” Glavin said in one Trooper 1 hearing.
His team pressed this point in a lawsuit that another former aide, Charlotte Bennett, filed in September 2022. The defense “is going to rely on Ms. Boylan and the fact that she was out in public making false accusations and using those false accusations to recruit others to embellish their own claims,” asserted Trzaskoma in another hearing.
Boylan’s lawyers have slammed the claim as “character assasination” and dismissed them as a conspiracy theory.
Today, Boylan calls herself the “grandma” of the group of accusers. The 41-year-old, who is married and raising an 11-year-old daughter, has perhaps weathered more than any of them, simply by being older and, in this instance, louder, as she now protests Cuomo’s bid for mayor.
Boylan landed at the state’s main economic development agency in 2015, after positions in urban planning and investment banking. After rising to become the Empire State Development Corporation’s chief of staff, she began working more directly with the governor.
Soon, Cuomo started asking that she work for him directly, she said. “When he identifies someone that he likes, you’re pretty much asked pretty consistently,” she testified to investigators. “You learn very quickly you can’t say no.”
After she accepted a special advisor role, Cuomo made frequent comments about her appearance, she testified. On one occasion she said that after Cuomo’s dog jumped on her, the former governor commented “if I was the dog, I’d mount you too.” On another, he wouldn’t let her off the phone until she sang happy birthday to him, leaving her feeling “embarassed” and “humiliated.”
Boylan left in 2018 after less than a year in the role. She later ran for Congress and Manhattan Borough President.
In December 2020, Boylan tweeted about the “toxic team environment” of the governor’s office, prompting Bennett, 25, to send her a DM to thank her and share that she had been sexually harassed. The two spoke on the phone and started to share their experiences, Boylan said. When she saw Cuomo’s name floated for U.S. attorney general in the Biden administration a few days later, Boylan kept tweeting: “Yes, @NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched.”
Boylan told investigators that she didn’t think much about the decision before writing more. “It was a kamikaze mission and it kind of did destroy my life for a little bit,” she testified. “I couldn’t deal with knowing that that had happened to Charlotte and on some level knowing that had happened to a lot of women,” adding “I had to speak up.”
Another former employee of Cuomo’s named Kaitlin saw Boylan’s tweet, too. She hit “like” and then tweeted that she believed Boylan. A state senator at the time, Alessandra Biaggi, who also had worked for Cuomo, saw Kaitlin’s tweet and liked it too.
Two months later, Boylan published a detailed Medium post that included screenshots of emails with a staffer showing how Cuomo had compared her to a former girlfriend.
Days later, Bennett also went public in an interview with the New York Times. In sworn testimony she described the “extremely abusive” culture in the governor’s office, recounting how Cuomo asked her to do push-ups for him and how, on another occasion, he asked her to sing the Irish folk song “Danny Boy” in front of staff. While alone with him in his office, she said that the governor told her he was looking for a girlfriend in the Albany area, that he was okay with women over 22 years old and asked if she had ever been with an older man.
Cuomo’s team suspected a coordinated effort, accusing Boylan of making allegations to boost her campaign for borough president and began building a case that the women were coordinating their stories. It remains a throughline of the former governor’s defense. “There’s going to be a lot of information about the nature and reach and scope of their joint effort to coordinate, recruit and encourage others,” that is revealed in the case, said Trzaskoma in a January 2024 hearing.
Today, Boylan, Bennett, Kaitlin and Biaggi are among the potential witnesses in the Trooper 1 case subject to subpoenas for reams of documents and testimony.
‘Boiling the Ocean’
This broad quest for documents is “insane,” Boylan’s lawyer, Danya Perry, said in a hearing last January. “They have made what is normal and healthy support for other women who are victimized into something disgusting and nefarious,” she continued. “They’re a network of survivors and they talk to each other, and they are friends, many of them.”
In just one subpoena, Cuomo’s team requested 16 categories of documents from Boylan, including drafts of her Medium post, and communications with journalists, with anyone who worked in the executive chamber and any regarding an alleged previous sexual relationship.
In addition, the defense has issued at least 25 subpoenas to people with some connection to Boylan, including for records from her 2021 borough president campaign and workplace conduct while employed at the state development agency as well as testimony from a previous boss and a college intern who worked on her campaign.
“They are boiling the ocean. They are looking under every rock and that is not what is allowed under the law. There is not a precedent for what they are doing here,” said Perry.
The barrage of subpoenas isn’t limited to the Trooper 1 case. After Bennett sued, Cuomo’s team dove so deeply into her personal life that they subpoenaed her college for records about an alleged sexual assault Bennett had reported, as well as subpoenaed the man who Bennett had accused of assault to testify.
Cuomo’s lawyers supported the requests by alleging Bennett was lying and said she was making “sexual harassment and sexual assault kind of her personal brand.”
“We were seeking records of a false claim of sexual misconduct. So we were not seeking records of something that happened. We’re seeking records of something that didn’t happen,” Trzaskoma told the judge.
Trench Warfare
It’s not unusual for attorneys to make broad requests for documents during discovery — the critical period in a lawsuit where both parties ask for evidence from the opposing side and potential witnesses in order to build their case.
“These are hard-fought cases,” said Lisa Bloom, an attorney who has represented a number of women in sexual harassment claims, as well as briefly advising Harvey Weinstein. “In discovery everybody can cast a wide net. They can ask for a lot of documents and information. They can make all kinds of wild accusations.”
Still there are limits to discovery requests, as outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In 2015, the Supreme Court approved changes to these rules to more clearly limit the scope of discovery. To ensure cases are as speedy and inexpensive as possible, attorneys must consider whether a request is in balance with the true needs of the case — in legal terms to consider its “proportionality” and relevance.
In the Trooper 1 case, Cuomo’s voluminous subpoenas have drawn criticisms from a slew of lawyers who represent potential witnesses, as well as from the magistrate judge, for potentially violating this standard. In one subpoena to the attorney general’s office, Cuomo’s team requested nearly all 74,000 documents reviewed in the sexual harassment investigation, including confidential witness lists, interview memos and unredacted transcripts.
Merkl called the request “extraordinarily broad” and “not proportional to the needs of the case.”
The Attorney General’s Office disputed it, too. “We’re talking about highly sensitive, privileged information that goes right to the heart of our office’s ability to conduct these kinds of investigations in the future and that have no relevance to the Trooper 1 case,” said Serena Longley, a former attorney for the office, in a September 2023 hearing.
Glavin maintains the requests are critical to Cuomo’s defense, repeatedly declining to narrow their scope, despite initial requests from Merkl to do so. “It goes to our ability to defend against the allegations,” said Glavin in a February 2023 hearing, arguing that “a number of these incidents did not happen in the way they’re being alleged.”
Her frustration has shown too, arguing it’s been “a death wrestle” to get “basic discovery.”
The subpoena battle over the Attorney General’s Office documents has gone on for nearly three years, but it is just one of dozens of face-offs kindled by requests from Cuomo’s team, drawing in at least two dozen lawyers to fight them in court.
“We repeatedly asked Trooper 1 to drop those women from her suit to avoid unnecessary and costly litigation — including having to depose them — but Trooper 1 refused,” said Glavin in a statement to THE CITY.
Trooper 1’s counsel has insisted that the inclusion of other allegations is necessary to build the strongest case. “I understand that that means that there are quite a number of victims here but that is not Trooper 1’s fault. That is the fault of the governor and his conduct,” said Valdi Licul, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys. “It would be wholly improper and unfair to require Trooper 1 to litigate this case with the governor saying well, these were just petty slights and minor inconveniences when his conduct was repeated over and over and over again.”
Merkl has also asked Trooper 1’s attorneys to consider removing the other women from the complaint, though she clarified in a hearing that she was not criticizing the plaintiff’s litigation strategy. Still, she wanted to be mindful of the possibility of “survivors of sexual harassment being retraumatized through a discovery process.”
Paul Grimm, a retired federal district court judge and professor at Duke Law School, pointed to the critical role of trial judges as case managers to help move litigation along. Grimm, who chaired the committee that oversaw the 2015 changes to the civil procedure rules about discovery, said that while judges vary in how firmly they may steer a case, the amendments included more tools for them, including the power to switch the costs of discovery to the party making extensive document requests.
“The best way to stop all this bickering is you just don’t give them the opportunity to do it,” said Grimm about discovery disputes. “The judge should keep a tight monitoring on discovery so that it doesn’t spin out of control.”
In January 2024, Merkl ruled in one order that many of the defense’s subpoenas to Boylan did not meet the standard of relevance and proportionality, including those for drafts of her Medium essay, communications about an alleged sexual relationship and campaign fundraising records.
Other times she appeared more hesitant. In order for Cuomo to properly defend himself, she said in one hearing, “There’s a lot of discovery that he may need to take in order to move to strike those allegations.”
Grimm noted the potential consequences facing any judge ruling on discovery disputes. “If the judge fails to take things in hand,” Grimm said, “it enables discovery abuse to expand, and this makes the discovery much more expensive and delays resolution of the case.”
Slow-Moving Legal Quagmire
A key motivation for the proportionality amendments was a concern that litigants with enormous resources could bludgeon less moneyed adversaries with costly discovery demands. “It’s a “constant problem in litigation,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of law at NYU who teaches legal ethics.
Lawyers for the other women subpoenaed in the Trooper 1 case have repeatedly pointed to Cuomo’s extensive state-funded resources, which are coming close to topping $10 million in a case that still doesn’t have a trial date. “Cuomo has nothing but time and money to burn, and a public narrative he desperately would like to relitigate,” said Perry, the lawyer for Boylan in one filing.
While lawyers agreed it was difficult to compare the Trooper 1 case to any precedent, litigators who have worked on similar cases told THE CITY that the defense costs are usually much lower. They put the cost for a single client in a sexual harassment suit at generally between several hundred thousand dollars and $1 million.
In one similar instance covered under the Public Officer’s Law, the state defended Assemblymember Dennis Gabrysak, who resigned in 2014 following accusations that he harassed seven women in his office. The complaints alleged that Gabrysak made sexual jokes around his employees, touched their bodies and discussed his visits to a local strip club. The total bill to represent Gabrysak in six separate cases that spanned a decade came to about $950,000.
The growing costs of the Cuomo defense have drawn criticism from Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, and Erica Vladimer, the director of Harassment Free New York, a victim advocacy group. In February, they called on DiNapoli to investigate Cuomo’s spending, citing language in the Public Officers Law that entitles state employees to “reasonable expenses” for their legal defenses. In a later interview with THE CITY, Vladimer said that the state should evaluate the substance of what the state is paying for: “Harassment and retaliation is not a litigation strategy, period.”
DiNapoli’s office said in a letter that while it audits the expenses submitted, it is “not at liberty to substitute our legal judgment for that of the attorney certified under state law to represent the defendant.”
That gives lawyers a certain amount of freedom in how they decide to litigate those cases, said Sam Breslin, an attorney based in Albany who has represented clients under the public officers law.
“Those are great cases because they’re limitless work,” Breslin said. “You’re not going to find a private client often who is willing to pay you $300 an hour to do absolutely everything under the sun possible to defend a case,” Breslin said.
All of these factors together have created a slow-moving, legal quagmire. While Bloom, the harassment lawyer, acknowledged how draining these cases may be, she added: “It’s inexcusable that there’s been three years of discovery.”
So far, the Trooper 1 case has failed Grimm’s basic test for discovery: “Just ask yourself, is it just, speedy and inexpensive?”
“It doesn’t sound like it is,” he said.
Feeling Terrible and Defeated
In April 2023, Cuomo’s defense team subpoenaed Kaitlin — the woman who tweeted in support of Boylan back in December 2020 — for records and testimony in the Trooper 1 case. The requests kicked off two years in which Cuomo’s team has sought her phone records, private medical records and threatened to expose her identity, which is covered by a confidentiality order.
Unlike Boylan, Kaitlin never wanted to be in the public eye. She briefly worked for Cuomo after a chance encounter with the former governor at a political fundraiser in December 2016, where, she testified in the attorney general’s investigation, he told her she was going to work for the state government. A week later, she was offered a job in Cuomo’s Manhattan office answering phones and attending events with the governor.
He was a tough boss, she said, frequently yelling if she dropped a call or included a photo of the governor that revealed his bald spot in any correspondence. He made note of her appearance, she testified, if she didn’t wear makeup or if she had rushed to work with her hair still wet from the shower.
She said she felt “terrible” and “defeated” after those moments and started buying new clothes and shoes in order to please the governor. She described another occasion where Cuomo asked her to search for something on his computer. She leaned over his desk, dressed in a skirt and heels, as he sat in his chair behind her, which made her uncomfortable. After a few months, she moved to a role at a different agency.
When Kaitlin saw Boylan’s tweets in December 2020, it reminded her of her experience in the executive chamber and compelled her to reach out: “I just got worked up and angry with the governor again,” Kaitlin told investigators.
Boylan’s posts reminded another woman, Karen Hinton, of her time working for Cuomo when he served as secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s. Hinton detailed in a 2021 memoir about her time working in government an incident where she gave Cuomo an embrace and felt him aroused. She reached out to some of the women and invited Bennett and Boylan to her book launch party.
Many of the women stayed in touch, attending events, posting on social media or talking on the phone. Some spoke to reporters to help corroborate details of the working environment in the executive chamber. They’ve all become targets of subpoenas in the Trooper 1 case.
Kaitlin retained a lawyer and initially produced about 250 pages of documents that she had previously turned over to the Attorney General’s Office. Biaggi, who hit “like” on Kaitlin’s tweet, was subpoenaed for a year of communications with Hinton, Boylan and Bennett. Hinton was subpoenaed too. Cuomo’s lawyers asked for all drafts of her book and for communications with the other women including Boylan and Bennett.
Hinton told THE CITY that she was glib about the subpoenas at first. “If he wants to get all my documents and all my emails and all my phone calls he can have them, because there’s not anything in there that will help him. It will only hurt him,” she said.
Hinton’s husband, Howard Glaser, once a longstanding top aide to Cuomo, decided to hire a lawyer in order to limit her exposure. Both Glaser and Hinton had public falling outs with their former boss.
“I really resented it, because I just felt like it was another form of harassment,” Hinton said of the subpoena.
Shortly after Hinton received the subpoena, Glaser got a call from Cuomo, according to interviews and a court filing. Glaser told THE CITY that Cuomo was seeking reconciliation, but when he didn’t show interest, the former governor grew threatening. “If she goes there [referring to sexual harassment claims against defendant Cuomo], there’s stuff on her that will come out,” Cuomo said, according to a filing by Hinton’s lawyer, describing the incident. “They have material on Karen that’s not good for her, the kind of thing she wouldn’t want her children to see.”
“It was his form of intimidation and threats,” said Hinton of the call.
In a letter filed to the court, Cuomo’s attorneys acknowledged the phone call but contested its substance. The letter did not deny that Cuomo made threats to Glaser. It said that separately, Hinton told her lawyers that damaging information could be revealed about Cuomo if he pursued the subpoenas.
Meanwhile, after Kaitlin initially produced the 250 pages of documents, Cuomo’s defense team continued to request more, including communications with Hinton, Biaggi and any of the women who had spoken to the Attorney General’s Office. Despite a half-a-dozen meetings with Kaitlin’s lawyers over discovery, Cuomo’s team subpoenaed Verizon for three and a half years of Kaitlin’s cell phone records without notifying them.
“Cuomo’s lawyers have not explained how such a broad request for highly personal information could possibly be relevant or proportionate to this case,” her lawyer, Zoe Salzman, wrote to the court.
Cuomo’s lawyers also said they would not respect the protective order in the case that had designated Kaitlin’s last name as confidential, in a move that Salzman said was intended “to punish and harass” her client. The defense team filed photos of Kaitlin to the docket, which were later removed.
Salzman wasn’t the only one contesting the subpoenas. The disputes led to 16 lawyers representing seven women to appear at a hearing in September 2023. By that time, Cuomo’s team had issued at least 48 subpoenas. Each came with similar complaints — the discovery requests were not proportional to the needs of the case and their clients had no knowledge of Trooper 1’s own claims. Trooper 1’s lawyers called it a form of witness intimidation.
“I want to find some guard rails because this, as we know, is off the rails,” Merkl said.
She was critical of the scope of Cuomo’s requests, too, noting, “subpoenaing all of the phone records under the sun is not going to happen, and I think Ms Glavin knows that.”
A lawyer for a former health department worker known only as “state employee #2” in the Attorney General’s report pleaded with the court that “she left public service to go home, frankly, to heal and she wants no part of this.” The woman only met Cuomo when she gave him a COVID-19 test during one of his televised briefings and he made comments that she perceived to be sexual. “To be dragged into this is not proportional to anything, and it retraumatizes her,” he continued.
Similar to her ruling limiting the extensive subpoenas served on Boylan and people around her subpoena, Merkl again limited the amount of discovery necessary from the women. In a new order, she wrote that Cuomo was not authorized to seek Kaitlin’s phone records and that the discovery sought from both Hinton and State Employee #2 was not necessary.
Since then, other discovery disputes have continued. As recently as May 2, Boylan’s lawyers cited her history of trauma while challenging a subpoena requiring that she sit for a deposition. They argued that it would be too burdensome on someone who is only a potential witness in the case and considering the tense proceedings. As Merkl cautioned the defense to not be dismissive of someone’s trauma history, she ruled to uphold the subpoena, adding a four-hour time limit.
Citing her own excruciating experience in the litigation, Bennett decided to drop her case against Cuomo last December, writing “throughout this extraordinarily painful two year process, I’ve many times believed that I’d be better off dead than endure more of his litigation abuse which has caused extraordinary expense to my family and friends.”
But still, she remains entangled in the web of litigation stemming from the harassment. accusations against Cuomo. She settled an action against the state, but four days after dropping her federal suit against the former governor, his team issued a new subpoena in the Trooper 1 case. They filed notice of a defamation suit as well. Cuomo’s lawyers have alleged that Bennett dropped her case “to avoid having to admit under oath that her allegations were false and her claims had no merit.”
Even as Bennett has tried to walk away from the litigation, Cuomo’s team will get the chance to depose her, anyway, following a ruling from Merkl that her testimony is relevant to the Trooper 1 case.
After three years, Boylan’s deposition and hers remain to be scheduled, with the court setting a new deadline to complete discovery by later this summer.
Long before then, on June 24, voters will choose whether to elect Cuomo as the Democratic candidate for mayor.
