In the bombshell New Yorker piece that resulted in Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s resignation over multiple allegations of sexual misconduct Monday night, one of his accusers claims that she was urged to keep quiet about his alleged physical abuse because “Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.”
“After the former girlfriend ended the relationship” the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer report, “she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.”
“She described this response as heartbreaking.”
This apparently happened even though the physical and mental abuse this unnamed woman alleges is objectively horrifying:
[T]he former girlfriend … had been in love with Schneiderman, but that in bed he had routinely slapped her hard across the ear and the face, as tears rolled down her cheeks. He also choked her and spat at her. Not all the abuse had taken place in a sexual context. She said that Schneiderman had once slapped her during an argument they’d had while getting dressed to go out. The blow left a handprint on her back; the next day, the spot still hurt. When the former girlfriend objected to this mistreatment, he told her that she simply wasn’t “liberated” enough. Just as Schneiderman had done with the other women, he had pushed her to drink with him and to set up a threesome, and he had belittled her work and appearance, saying in her case that she had fat legs and needed Botox.
These allegations of choking, slapping, spitting, demanding threesomes and drinking, and humiliating comments about her physical appearance, almost perfectly mirror allegations from three other women, including two who have publicly come forward.
One of Schneiderman’s alleged victims, described by the New Yorker as prominent in the legal world, admits that, although she alleges he “slapped me across the face hard, twice,” and hard enough to leave a mark, she remained silent for political reasons.
“Now that I know it’s part of a pattern, I think, God, I should have reported it,” she told the New Yorker. “But, back then, I believed that it was a one-time incident. And I thought, He’s a good attorney general, he’s doing good things. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.”
She also claims Schneiderman hit her so hard “the blow left a red handprint.”
Before he resigned Monday night, Schneiderman was not only the Democrat attorney general for New York, but a high-profile politician who had spent decades posing as a champion of women’s rights.
As attorney general, he embraced the #MeToo by pursuing criminal charges against Harvey Weinstein, and used his office as a powerful weapon in the anti-Trump Resistance movement, including a $40 million civil suit against Trump University and some 50 lawsuits to stop Trump from revising environmental regulations.
“This is a man who has staked his entire career, his personal narrative, on being a champion for women publicly. But he abuses them privately. He needs to be called out,” Tanya Selvaratnam said.
Schneiderman denies any wrongdoing.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Comments are closed.