Government

NYU Law School Ethics Professor Pegged In Efforts To Discredit Andrew Cuomo Accuser

It's worth taking some time to get inside the heads of those who enable this conduct.

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(Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Back in March, we talked about NYU adjunct Linda Lacewell, the Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, who found herself deeply embroiled in an ethics scandal of her own over edits made to official government reports that downplayed the severity of Cuomo’s decision to send elderly COVID patients back to nursing homes to alleviate the hospital bed crunch that — as a reminder — were missing because Cuomo spent the previous several years eliminating them. This all went down right as Cuomo was selling his new book about his COVID response.

Apparently ethical quandaries aren’t easy to miss at senior levels of the Cuomo administration, as Lacewell is also named in the NYAG’s sexual harassment investigation report. The folks at Campus Reform are all over this because they exist to complain about vaccination policies and courses that mention racism, but occasionally near-sighted squirrels find a nut.

According to the report, Lacewell was among a number of top aides who “described Ms. Boylan as crazy and having a political agenda,” checking up on her LinkedIn profile, and allegedly discussed recording a phone call from one of the accuser’s co-workers like some The Wire cosplay. Lacewell is also mentioned as a key contributor in the governor’s damage control campaign, including circulating letters questioning the harassment allegations and a statement from women who worked with the governor and thought he was a stand up guy.

Which… is not good. But it’s also part of Sexual Harassment 101.

That’s why the first thing “successful” — at least for many years — harassers do is build a network of loyal friends who “never see that side of him.” They can then ride the resulting cognitive dissonance into creating a gang that informally bullies people into silence. Sometimes, a harasser can find a posse that actively embraces a hostile, harassing work environment. But it’s also not entirely common, and the subtle recruitment of confused allies crops up much more often.

Because cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug. If your friend and professional patron for years, if not decades, is suddenly facing accusations for behavior you’ve never witnessed, it’s going to put you on the defensive. The “believe women” catchphrase gets a lot of flack from lawyers who try to cast it as perverting the presumption of innocence, and if that were a jury instruction I’d agree. But the point of the admonition to believe women isn’t really about changing the justice process, it’s a mantra to remain vigilant in the face of that dissonance. “Believe women” is there to make you stop for half a second before calling an accuser unstable just because they’ve named your buddy.

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This doesn’t by any means absolve Lacewell if she really pushed an effort to silence a victim. Even if someone doesn’t realize they’re in too deep with a bad actor, it’s still important how far they take it. It’s one thing to draft a letter declaring that this behavior is uncharacteristic and fails to comport with personal experience and another to denigrate the accuser as crazy right off the bat.

There’s a line in the movie Grosse Pointe Blank, “it’s not an excuse, it’s a reason” that always stuck with me. The point is there’s value in recognizing how people who should know better can get into bad situations. A reductive view of a harasser’s network as like-minded trolls sells short the many different ways people get sucked into enabling powerful harassers.

More often than not, it’s a slow poison that turns environments hostile. Stay constantly on guard against becoming a tool in that web.

Lacewell isn’t scheduled to teach at NYU in the coming semester and may never teach again. The school told Campus Reform that they are monitoring the situation. Still, it’s a bad look for any who ever taught ethics.

Earlier: NYU Law School Ethics Professor Embroiled In Major Ethics Scandal

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How Cuomo’s office sought help from prominent liberal advocates as it pushed to discredit an accuser [Washington Post]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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