Former Aide Alleges Gillibrand's Office Mishandled Sexual Harassment Complaint

NY Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand.

An ex-aide to New York Senator and 2020 candidate Kirsten Gillibrand has accused her former employer of hypocrisy, arguing that the Congresswoman positioned herself as a staunch advocate of the #MeToo movement, even as her office minimized and mishandled sexual harassment complaints.

Speaking to Politico, the anonymous aide catalogued inappropriate remarks allegedly made by a staffer with a close relationship to Gillibrand. After she reported him, the woman said, that staffer—Abbas Malik—began retaliating against her at work, prompting the woman to quit while Malik kept his job. The office's in-house sexual harassment investigation left her feeling "defeated," "devalued," "belittled, insulted, and intimidated," the woman wrote in a resignation letter addressed to Gillibrand, her chief of staff, and her general counsel.

"I trusted and leaned on this statement that you made: 'You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable,'" she wrote. "Your office chose to go against your public belief that women shouldn't accept sexual harassment in any form and portrayed my experience as a misinterpretation."

The woman says Malik began harassing her after he received a promotion on July 10th. Allegedly, he sent flirty texts; made comments like, "If we had met in a bar, would it have happened for us?" and, "Why do I love you! I should hate you!"; and froze her out when she tried to distance herself from him. The woman alerted deputy chief of staff Anne Bradley, who alerted chief of staff Jess Fassler: they set the formal complaint process in motion. However, the former staffer says that they didn't enlist a third party to investigate the claims, which Gillibrand has repeatedly advocated in other contexts, nor did they contact former staffers the woman said could corroborate Malik's behavior.

The Senator's office told Politico that an outside investigator was "not a realistic or viable option."

The woman made her initial complaint on July 25th; by July 30th, the office had "disciplined" Malik by way of a demotion. While she wasn't entirely satisfied, the staffer told Politico she felt the office did what they could—until Fassler apparently told her that, while he had plenty of reasons to fire Malik, he could also come up with reasons to fire any member of the staff, including her. And when she complained that Malik appeared to be leaving her out of the loop deliberately, she found herself accidentally CC'd on an email suggesting that Fassler and Bradley were attempting to side-line her, too.

Gillibrand has been dubbed the "#MeToo Senator" because she has championed survivors of sexual violence, and has come out as a vocal critic of men accused of sexual misconduct: In 2017, for example, she classified Bill Clinton's relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky as a transgression worth resigning over. The woman told Politico that she felt Gillibrand's reaction to sexual harassment allegations within her own office defied the Senator's believe-survivors political stance, and in August, she resigned.

In a statement to Politico, Gillibrand said: "These are challenges that affect all of our nation's workplaces, including mine, and the question is whether or not they are taken seriously. As I have long said, when allegations are made in the workplace, we must believe women so that serious investigations can actually take place, we can learn the facts, and there can be appropriate accountability. That's exactly what happened at every step of this case last year."