Railing at Enemies and Pleading for Time: Inside Cuomo’s Final Days

Behind the scenes, the governor vacillated between defiant and defeated, eventually accepting that his formidable political army had fallen away.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was wearing everyone down. He was being wronged, he railed to advisers over the weekend, and with few allies left to defend him publicly after a damning state attorney general’s report into allegations of sexual harassment, he feared voters were getting an unshakable impression, according to people with direct knowledge of his conversations. Everyone was talking about 11 women, he complained privately, but only a handful of accusations were truly damaging in a vacuum, he felt. And those he saw fit to fight. Never mind the toll that the report was having on some of those closest to Mr. Cuomo, including his brother, Chris Cuomo, the CNN host whose familial counsel on the allegations caused an outcry, and his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, who had already been considering stepping down for weeks. Never mind that a new revelation from the investigation — that Mr. Cuomo had harassed a female trooper on his security detail — had astonished even those who knew him best.