Jesus, After seeing those awful ads against Mandami, Mandami could just have run this as his whole campaign.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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“Mr. Cuomo, in 2021, thirteen different women who worked in your administration credibly accused you of sexual harassment,” said Mamdani. “Since then, you have spent more than $20 million in taxpayer funds to defend yourself, all while describing these allegations as entirely political. You have even gone so far as to legally go after these women. One of those women, Charlotte Bennett, is here in the audience this evening.”
I didn't even know this happened at a debate. Nice
Reminds me of when Liz Warren slaughtered Mike Bloomberg onstage during a debate. She totally wrecked his campaign.
Jfc, he spent $20 million of taxpayer dollars to defend himself in court? Why the fuck do politicians get to use public funds to legally defend themselves?
If they didn't, then the result would be constant SLAPP suits against politicians that are disliked by a certain type of asshole.
What should happen is that money should be instantly applied to the politician as debt when the case is lost.
That's a good middle ground of protecting them from the worst actors, but not from their actual actions.
I would also love it if a plaintiff attorney could act as a prosecutor in cases of corruption or violated rights, with the ability to send politicians (and cops) to prison when they violate rights.
The current arrangement is not acceptable.
If public defenders are good enough for everyone else, they’re good enough for politicians. Maybe they’ll actually get some funding and support that way.
Agreed ,the only defenders should be public and appointed by a lottery. If you can butu a better defender the system is corrupt.
This is the way!
You don't get a public defender for civil lawsuits, which are the majority of those kinds of lawsuits. So no, public defenders aren't good enough for everyone, because they don't exist for civil lawsuits.
Yep that is an accurate description of the way the broken system currently works. Thanks!
Yeah. That's the proper response to your statement being wrong. Lol. . .
Yes, the system has issues--the issue being that the loser in the suit doesn't take the burden of reasonable attorney costs for both parties. That alone would fix most of it. Government doesn't need to give anyone a right to a civil lawyer.
"We should change the way things work." "Thats not how things work" great argument buddy, glad we could hash this out.
I mean you stayed.
If the public defenders are good enough for everyone else
as a present which is not the case, since they're not in civil lawsuits
Yes, but if we changed the rules we could, for example, add funding to the office of the Public Defenders and they could hire a special lawyer for civil cases against public servants available to anyone who doesn't wish to pay for their own laywers.
The dude lost, why the fuck are we still talking about him? jfc
He lost this election. Who knows what else he may run for in future. He also didn't stop being a public figure.
gee a rapist from New York, no way he could ever be President.
Twice.
Is he in his 70's yet?
"Im not a sex pest, I'm iTaLiAn"
-Cuomo more or less
Good god. No wonder Trump supported him.
No one deserves to be sexually harassed or assaulted. Just wish his lawyer figured that out sooner.
I don't know, it seems pretty fair to me to say that if you prevent justice from being done for an act committed against someone else then you deserve to have that act directed at you, at least in general terms. That sort of consequential thinking is one of the first things we teach our kids. Why should the answer change just because the subject matter does? It seems pretty reasonable to assume that this lawyer did not genuinely believe Cuomo was innocent. Perhaps "deserve" isn't quite the right word but I think "fuck around and find out" certainly applies, and when you summarize that phrase it expresses pretty much the same sentiment as the word deserving.
The job of a defender is to hold the judicial system to a high standard, to ensure the prosecution does its job properly and to provide a counterweight on the scales of justice.
If a criminal walks free, it's not the fault of the defender, but of the prosecution if they failed to find convincing evidence of his guilt.
Coversely, if an innocent person does get convicted, the defender failed to effectively refute the evidence.
Of course, this idealism doesn't hold if the system is fucked by crooked courts, biased judges and competent, committed counsel being unaffordable to poor people, but that also doesn't mean the defender is to blame for playing their part well.
So every public defender deserves to be shot then?
I don't think I would phrase it that way but if you make a career out of knowingly getting murderers off the hook then yeah, you deserve bad things. There's lots of people who deserve things, both good and bad, that never get those things. Being deserving of something is not a guarantee that you will get it.
But how do you know they’re a murderer until it’s proven in a fair trial?
I see where you're coming from but can't say I agree with your conclusion. She had much more information and time to make her judgments about Cuomo than a typical woman has before they have to make a judgement call on people who could be dangerous. She's also very well paid, it's not as if Cuomo wouldn't have representation if she refused him. Despite this I really dont believe that sexual harassment/assualt can serve as some sort of punishment or some catalyst that sparks rehabilitation, or even positive change. I also don't believe physical or mental forms of violence can achieve those aims so maybe that's part of it.
You definitely shouldn't be teaching children "eye for an eye" or that turnabout is fair play. It's good to teach that actions have consequences, but it's not okay to tell them that rapists deserve to get raped, that's fucked up.
That sort of teaching is incredibly common whether you think it should be or not. If you have kids I'm sure you've done it yourself many times. "You ate Timmy's candy so now you have to give your candy to Timmy" is not fundamentally different from what I said above.
That's quite a bit different of an example. What you just said is actions have consequences. If you steal something, your punishment is a monetary penalty. That would be equivalent to, "you raped someone, you pay a fine and go to jail". If your example had little Timmy stealing candy from the perp, that would be more in line with the initial compare.
The examples don't hold up the best compared to something like rape because there is an exchange of items vs a physical action. A better comparison would be little Timmy got bit by little Sally so now Timmy gets to bite her back. Rational people don't teach their kids to bite back instead teaching them to get an adult to handle Sally.
All this to say there's also self defense which is notably different from retaliation.
Literally at the election result party where at no point did he even have an excuse of being overwhelmed with positive emotion...
It wouldn't be a valid excuse, but it's a frequent excuse. He was just drunk and wanted to kiss her, and it didn't matter what she wanted or consented to. Even in a room with a bunch of people and journalists.
The guy is a complete piece of shit, and so is everyone that knows him and endorsed him.
In the pictures she looks scared and trying to turn away while he grabs her neck. This was legit sexual assault in broad daylight and documented by the press in real time...
“average new yorker harasses women” factoid actualy just statistical error. Sexual Harassment Georg, who used to be mayor and sexually harasses over 10,000 women each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
It is true a lot of crime statistics across the US are skewed horribly by a minority of chronic, repeat offenders.
That's everywhere. Most people just live their lives. Outliers drive almost everything.
Lawyers are hired to defend you, regardless of whether or not you're guilty. She may not have liked this, but she can't claim she was surprised.
Why would we assume it's not consensual? It would make sense if they're fucking.
Why would we assume its not consensual?
Track record
The title made me assume it wasn't but the article doesn't say anything about it not having been consensual. Clickbait
You should look at the photos.
I saw them, they were in the article
If you think she looks OK with what is happening, you should take a long, hard look at your life.
I don't think I can know from such a candid photo if consent was given beforehand but alright. An confirmation that it was unconsensual from the person involved would be nice though