Time’s Up Boss Roberta Kaplan Resigns After Being Named in Cuomo Sexual Harassment Report
© AP Photo / D. Ross Cameron
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The Time’s Up advocacy group was earlier blasted by multiple critics after it was revealed that a top executive with the organization was consulted on the sexual misconduct claims raised against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The talks came months before the consultation was made public in findings released by the New York Attorney General’s Office.
A top boss with the Time’s Up charity organization has resigned from her post after it was detailed in an explosive sexual harassment report that she was consulted in a damage control scheme being carried out by insiders within the Cuomo administration.
The advocacy group announced early Monday that Roberta Kaplan, a prominent progressive lawyer who served on the Time’s Up board and as co-founder of the group’s Legal Defense Fund, resigned from her posts amid heavy fallout over her work advising New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo when harassment allegations first surfaced in late 2020.
A Monday statement issued by Time’s Up on the development states that Kaplan’s resignation was “right and the appropriate thing to do,” but that it also highlighted the need for the organization to be more transparent and implement a “more inclusive process to engage the broader survivor community.”
In a resignation letter obtained by the New York Times, Kaplan explains that her work as a lawyer effectively prevents her from being fully transparent, as it runs in direct opposition to her duties as a legal representative.
Roberta Kaplan, left, a lead lawyer in Sines v. Kessler, and Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, the nonprofit funding the lawsuit, pose for a photo in Atherton Calif., Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. Sines v. Kessler was brought by a group of plaintiffs against white nationalists involved in planning a 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va. in which one counter-protester was killed and several others were injured.
© AP Photo / D. Ross Cameron
“Unfortunately, recent events have made it clear that even our apparent allies in the fight to advance women can turn out to be abusers. We have felt the raw, personal and profound pain of that betrayal,” she wrote, before detailing her move to resign from her post.
Fallout against Kaplan began to emerge moments after the damning sexual harassment report detailed nearly a dozen cases in which Cuomo allegedly harassed former and current aides on repeat occasions. The findings specifically pinned Kaplan as having reviewed a letter that rejected the legitimacy of allegations being voiced by former aide Lindsey Boylan and attacked her claims as being politically motivated.
Although the letter was only drafted and never published, it was part of a broader effort by Cuomo insiders to find any means in which to disparage allegations that were beginning to trickle in from government aides. The independent review also found instances in which Cuomo’s team of trusted advisers dispersed confidential information to character assassinate Boylan.
However, Kaplan was not the only prominent figure identified in the sexual harassment report as being part of an inner circle. Others named in the independent review include fellow Time’s Up leader Tina Tchen and Alphonso David, who served as a counselor for the Cuomo administration prior to becoming president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Alphonso David, counsel to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, during a news conference in the Red Room at the state Capitol Monday, Feb. 11, 2019, in Albany, N.Y.
© AP Photo / Hans Pennink
Similar to Kaplan, David had been consulted in the drafting of the unpublished letter but never signed off on its contents, a note which was confirmed in the independent report released by the New York Attorney General’s Office.
The Human Rights Campaign detailed on Monday that it would be launching an independent review of its own to determine whether David’s work with the Cuomo team had in fact run in line with the organization’s “decades’ long mission of fighting for equality and justice for all.” David has underscored that he “fully” supports the investigation.
News of Kaplan’s resignation came shortly after a group of survivors and victims of sexual harassment and assault issued an open letter against the Time’s Up organization for “failing the survivor community.” The collective specifically accused Kaplan and Tchen, who has made no indication of resigning, of “weaponizing their knowledge of survivors’ experience to help Governor Cuomo and his office retaliate against at least one of nearly a dozen women.”
Kaplan’s decision to step down was preceded by the Sunday development that Melissa DeRosa, a top Cuomo aide who helped in discrediting accusers, resigned from her job. Named multiple times throughout the report, DeRosa was described in the report as one of the key staffers who helped create a “hostile work environment for women.”
