New York
With Cuomo Leading NYC Mayor’s Race, His Political Baggage Grows Heavier
Being the front-runner in a race for mayor of New York City often comes with exceptional scrutiny. But few have presented their opponents with quite as many targets as former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
In the weeks since Mr. Cuomo joined a crowded Democratic primary field and immediately catapulted to its front, a group of New Yorkers whose relatives were nursing home residents who died of Covid have repeatedly blamed him for their suffering.
Women’s groups have picketed his campaign events to remind voters of the sexual harassment accusations that drove him from the governor’s office.
Then, on Thursday, years-old sworn testimony surfaced in The New York Post describing Mr. Cuomo and his longtime top aide, Melissa DeRosa, as having been in an “emotionally intimate” relationship.
Mr. Cuomo’s proximity to Ms. DeRosa would seem to have little bearing on his qualifications to be mayor. But the sudden re-emergence of the long-denied rumors underscored how his tenure as governor left Mr. Cuomo with a lengthy list of enemies and political baggage ripe for attack.
For now, Mr. Cuomo has maintained a comfortable polling lead against nine Democratic challengers, including Mayor Eric Adams. Yet as New York City political history has long demonstrated, a perceived lead comes with real risks — especially months before Primary Day.
“When you’re the only game in town, you’re the only person to take down,” said Mike Morey, the campaign spokesman for then-Council Speaker Christine Quinn in 2013, who watched her early polling lead in that year’s mayor’s race collapse. “You’d probably rather be second or third place and just climbing.”
New York City lets voters rank up to five candidates in order of preference on their primary ballots. Opponents of Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Adams are trying to stop their ascent by popularizing the acronym D.R.E.A.M., or “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor.”
Mr. Cuomo’s result may well be different than Ms. Quinn’s. He is better known and more battle-tested than almost any of his predecessors. His allies believe that that he can prevail as long as he can redirect voters’ attention toward his record of accomplishment during roughly a decade as governor, during which New York State legalized same-sex marriage, raised the minimum wage and rebuilt LaGuardia Airport.
“New Yorkers know the city is in crisis and Governor Cuomo is the only candidate in this race with the experience and the record of results to help fix it and make it a safer and more affordable place for all,” said Rich Azzopardi, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman. “This is why these petty attacks are falling on deaf ears.”
But as Mr. Cuomo’s opponents are eager to point out, his tenure in Albany was also marked by turmoil, controversy and heavy-handed tactics that have left him with higher unfavorable ratings in recent polls than any candidate except Mr. Adams.
“The fly in the ointment is that he’s not particularly lovable,” said Mark Green, who narrowly won the 2001 Democratic primary for mayor, only to lose in the general election to Michael R. Bloomberg.
Those trying to stop Mr. Cuomo have been far more vivid. On Sunday, nine mayoral candidates gathered in Brooklyn alongside relatives of nursing home residents who died of Covid-related complications during Mr. Cuomo’s governorship. They hammered him for his policy directing nursing homes to admit hospital patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Could any other issue bring us all together with the differences that we have?” said Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor. “No — it’s the death, the unneeded death, of all these folks who were trusting the governor to do the right thing.”
Mr. Cuomo has said the state’s public health policies, including those involving nursing homes, adhered to federal guidelines, and he has accused federal authorities of trying to scapegoat him politically.
That controversy was largely eclipsed by accusations, including from former state employees, that Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed them. The claims prompted an investigation by the office of the New York attorney general, who concluded in August 2021 that Mr. Cuomo had harassed 11 women.
He resigned within days of the report’s release, though in the years since, he has spent millions of dollars in legal fees fighting to clear his name. He denies any wrongdoing.
It was in March of that year, around the time that Mr. Cuomo was facing the first of those accusations, that The Daily Mail approached the governor’s office with questions about his relationship with Ms. DeRosa. It was preparing to publish photographs that showed the pair seated close together, huddled in conversation over drinks at a Manhattan restaurant.
Ms. DeRosa was also concerned that the outlet would publish longstanding rumors that she and Mr. Cuomo were more than just colleagues. She called Josh Vlasto, who had previously served as Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff and who was an informal adviser, for advice on dealing with the publication, according to Mr. Vlasto’s testimony during the sexual harassment investigation.
In the transcript of that testimony, Mr. Vlasto is quoted as saying that Ms. DeRosa, who was married at the time, told him she did have an “emotional romantic relationship with the governor,” but said that the two had never been sexually involved.
“Emotionally intimate was the words she used,” Mr. Vlasto said. “I didn’t press on what that meant.”
The former governor’s younger brother, Chris Cuomo, was also brought in to brainstorm a response, according to Mr. Vlasto’s account. “He had said do you intend to be together in the long-term or do you intend to be together after you’re in office,” Mr. Vlasto said of Chris Cuomo. “She said I don’t know.”
The trio agreed that Ms. DeRosa would deny a romantic relationship to The Daily Mail; Ms. DeRosa ultimately told the publication that she and the governor “never had an intimate relationship.”
Mr. Vlasto testified that after The Daily Mail published the photographs, Ms. DeRosa told him that she had not had a romantic relationship with Mr. Cuomo, contradicting her earlier account.
Months later, in her own testimony in the sexual harassment investigation, Ms. DeRosa also denied having had a romantic relationship with Mr. Cuomo.
Investigators separately asked Mr. Cuomo whether he had had any romantic relationships with members of his staff.
“Never,” he said.
On Thursday, after The Post published its article, both Catherine M. Foti, a lawyer for Ms. DeRosa, and Mr. Azzopardi reiterated that there had been no physical relationship between Mr. Cuomo and Ms. DeRosa.
“Of course after seven years of working together for New York, the governor and Melissa were emotionally close,” Mr. Azzopardi said. “We all were after going through Covid and everything else together.”
Mr. Vlasto declined to comment.
The interview with Mr. Vlasto took place in the summer of 2021, but Mr. Vlasto’s account of Ms. DeRosa’s request was not reported before Thursday.
The transcript of his testimony posted on the attorney general’s website is redacted, and it conceals Ms. DeRosa’s name and much of Mr. Vlasto’s remarks about her and Mr. Cuomo. But an unredacted version of the transcript was posted briefly in 2022 as part of a broader tranche of investigative materials, before it was taken down and replaced.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general, Letitia James, said the unredacted version had been posted by accident, and that it had only been up for two hours.
The New York Times was able to access the unredacted transcript of Mr. Vlasto’s testimony using The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which preserves web pages.
Mr. Azzopardi, though, called for an investigation into how the unredacted transcript became public. In a statement, he accused Ms. James of using “lawfare” to harm Mr. Cuomo and of helping to resurface the transcript as part of a “transparent ploy” to aid one of his rivals in the mayor’s race, Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker.
The spokeswoman for Ms. James declined to comment on the accusation.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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