Melissa DeRosa, the top advisor to New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the most powerful unelected official in New York, resigned late today.
In “Cuomo’s Top Aide, Melissa DeRosa, Resigns as He Fights to Survive”, the New York Times’s Luis Ferré-Sadurní reports:
While the governor and Ms. DeRosa were traveling in a car, she said she told Mr. Cuomo, “I can’t believe that this happened. I can't believe you put yourself in a situation where you would be having any version of this conversation.”
After confronting Mr. Cuomo, Ms. DeRosa said she got out of the car, which had stopped at a traffic light. Around the same time, a new policy was put in place to prohibit Mr. Cuomo from being left alone with young female staff members to protect him from allegations of harassment.
Too little, too late, I know. Still, if only a similar policy had been put into place for Donald Trump! Many women would have been saved.
You can read more about DeRosa’s background in Ruth La Ferla’s puff piece “Who Can Say ‘No’ to Cuomo? His Top Aide, Melissa DeRosa” published in May 2020 in the NYT. These days, press coverage of DeRosa is less fawning.