What We Learned From the Andrew Cuomo Scandal
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate news director Susan Matthews is joined by Slate senior writer Christina Cauterucci to talk about the saga of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. They delve into the risks vs benefits of an investigation into sexual harassment complaints, and why it seemed so unlikely that Cuomo would go until suddenly he did. In the second half of the show, Susan and Christina look at the women behind the men in these scandals, and the impact this particular scandal had on Times Up, a nonprofit devoted to helping victims of sexual harassment and assault.
Recommendations:
Susan: Sending postcards, even after you’ve returned from your trip.
Christina: Harper’s Magazine piece, “Women Corinne Does Not Actually Know” by Rebecca Makkai.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon music. |
| 0:03.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:05.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:06.5 | This is the waves. This is the waves. |
| 0:08.4 | This is the waves. This is the waves. |
| 0:10.1 | This is the waves. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and governors who have to give back their Emmys. |
| 0:22.3 | Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds. |
| 0:26.8 | And today, you've got me, Susan Matthews, news director of Slate, and the editorial director of this podcast that you're listening to right now. |
| 0:34.8 | And you've got me, Christina Cauterucci. I'm a senior writer at Slate and host of |
| 0:40.1 | the Slate podcast Outward. Hi, Christina. I'm so excited to be here with you. Yeah, under very |
| 0:45.5 | unfortunate circumstances given the topic we're discussing. Almost always unfortunate circumstances. |
| 0:50.4 | So today we're going to be talking about Andrew Cuomo, who left the governor's mansion in New York this week after a month's long investigation into accusations of sexual harassment from several former staffers. |
| 1:00.6 | That investigation yielded a report that was so damaging that even Cuomo, who has been weathering scandals by simply toughing them out for years and years, couldn't keep doing it. |
| 1:09.9 | I'd like us to talk through why it |
| 1:12.5 | took so long until all of a sudden it didn't for him to leave and step down. And I'd also really |
| 1:18.3 | like to talk about what this particular sequence of events could and should teach us about where |
| 1:23.1 | Me Too is right now. And lastly, we're going to talk about a part of this scandal that I actually |
| 1:29.1 | think is the most interesting and fascinating aspect of all of this, which is the effect that |
| 1:34.3 | Cuomo's exit has had on Times Up, which is a pretty glitzy organization that launched |
| 1:40.5 | soon after the Me Too movement itself and is headed by many famous women, |
| 1:45.3 | one of whom had to step down in the wake of the Cuomo scandal and we're going to get |
... |
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