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.

A 16-year-old has been charged with several hate crimes in a gang attack on a Black teenager at a subway station this week, the police said.

The attack happened at 8 a.m. Monday at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, according to the police. The victim, 16, who has not been identified, was on his way to school when he was approached by a group of people, a police spokeswoman said. The group punched and kicked the boy, taunted him with racial slurs and removed one of his shoes, the spokeswoman said.

On Wednesday the police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with the attack. He faces five criminal charges, including hate crime robbery and hate crime gang assault in the second degree. The police did not release the name or ethnicity of the boy who was charged. The case is being investigated by the Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

Hate crimes on the subway, in line with broader trends, are down. The number of hate crimes in the system dropped 32 percent in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to police statistics. Data shows that crime on the subway has declined overall, though perceptions of criminality remain persistent: Barely a majority of riders, 56 percent, said they felt safe on the subway, according to a survey released in January.

That may be related to the increasingly random nature of subway crime and a series of high-profile violent episodes. The examples last year included a train conductor who was slashed late at night on an A train in Brooklyn in February. In December, at the same station in Coney Island where the teenager was attacked this week, Debrina Kawam, 57, died after being set on fire in a random early-morning attack on a parked train.

Nine days later, a man pushed Joseph Lynskey onto the tracks in front of a train at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan. He narrowly survived. People were pushed onto the tracks at least 25 times last year. (While riders might believe that young people are responsible for most violent crime, recent data finds that the average person charged with violence on the subway is 32 years old, compared with 24 nearly two decades ago.)

Officials at the M.T.A. have acknowledged that the rise in random attacks is concerning. Last year 1,000 members of the National Guard began patrolling the subways, on orders from Gov. Kathy Hochul. They were supported by officers from the State Police and the transit authority. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch also assigned more than 200 police officers to patrol platforms and subway cars, and reassigned hundreds more from administrative jobs to transit patrols, which allowed the department to place two officers aboard every train that runs overnight, Commissioner Tisch said.

A New York county clerk on Thursday blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a New York doctor for prescribing and sending abortion pills to a Texas woman.

The unprecedented move catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights.

The dispute is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court, pitting Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a shield law that is intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.

New York is one of eight states that have enacted “telemedicine abortion shield laws” after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022. The laws prevent officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or from responding to subpoenas and other legal actions — a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in such cases.

The action by the New York county clerk is the first time that an abortion shield law has been used.

This case involves Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide abortion pills to patients across the country. In December, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, accusing her of sending abortion pills to a Texas woman, in violation of the state’s ban.

Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers did not respond to the lawsuit and did not show up for a court hearing last month in Texas. Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court issued a default judgment, ordering Dr. Carpenter to pay a penalty of $113,000 and to stop sending abortion medication to Texas.

On Thursday, citing New York’s shield law, the acting clerk of Ulster County in Kingston, N.Y., Taylor Bruck, said he would not grant Texas’ motion seeking to enforce the Collin County order. He also refused to allow Texas to file a summons that sought to force Dr. Carpenter to pay the penalty and comply with the Texas ruling.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Mr. Bruck said in a statement. “Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.”

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had previously sent guidance to courts and officials throughout the state, directing them to follow the shield law and indicating how they could comply and which specific actions were prohibited.

“I commend the Ulster County Clerk for doing what is right,” Ms. James said in a statement. “New York’s shield law was created to protect patients and providers from out-of-state anti-choice attacks, and we will not allow anyone to undermine health care providers’ ability to deliver necessary care to their patients. My office will always defend New York’s medical professionals and the people they serve.”

The Texas attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that a likely next step would be for Texas to file a challenge to the shield law in a state or federal court in New York.

Texas was the first state with an abortion ban to initiate legal action against abortion providers in states with shield laws. In January, the first criminal charges against a shield-law abortion provider were filed in a second state, Louisiana. In that case, a state grand jury issued a criminal indictment, also against Dr. Carpenter, accusing her of violating Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban by sending pills to that state.

Last month, Louisiana officials issued an extradition order for Dr. Carpenter, which was immediately rebuffed by New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul.

“I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana — not now, not ever,” Ms. Hochul said then.

Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers have not commented about either the Texas or Louisiana case. The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization Dr. Carpenter co-founded, has issued statements in response to the cases. “Shield laws are essential in safeguarding and enabling abortion care regardless of a patient’s ZIP code or ability to pay,” the coalition has said. “They are fundamental to ensuring everyone can access reproductive health care as a human right.”

Telemedicine abortion shield laws have become a key strategy for supporters of abortion rights. Under these laws, which have been in use since summer 2023, health care providers in states where abortion is legal have been sending more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions.

The Texas lawsuit accuses Dr. Carpenter of providing a 20-year-old woman with the two medications used in a standard abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol. Typically used up through 12 weeks into pregnancy, mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for pregnancies to develop, and misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes contractions similar to a miscarriage.

According to a complaint filed by the Texas attorney general’s office, the woman, who had been nine weeks pregnant, asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room in July “because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding.” The man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage,” the suit said, and he went back to their home in Collin County, where he “discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.”

In the Collin County court hearing last month, Ernest C. Garcia, chief of the administrative law division in the attorney general’s office, said that the man “then filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.”