The Hypocrisy of Eric Schneiderman

Earlier this year, the New York attorney general’s office, led by Eric Schneiderman, brought a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein’s former production company, after the disgraced Hollywood mogul was accused of decades of sexual misconduct. At the request of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Schneiderman was also reviewing Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s 2015 decision not to prosecute Weinstein after an Italian model credibly accused him of groping her. “We have never seen anything as despicable as what we’ve seen right here,” he said of the allegations against Weinstein. Until this week, he was widely expected to run for governor after Cuomo.

Schneiderman’s image as an outspoken progressive champion was abruptly punctured on Monday, when The New Yorker published a damning and disturbing investigation into the New York attorney general’s behavior, including allegations of physical abuse by four women. Just three hours after the report’s publication, Schneiderman announced he would step down. “In the last several hours, serious allegations, which I strongly contest, have been made against me,” he said in a statement. “While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time. I therefore resign my office, effective at the close of business on May 8, 2018.”

Aside from former Minnesota Senator Al Franken, who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct last year, Schneiderman is one of the most high-profile progressive politician to be felled by the #MeToo movement. Indeed, the allegations against him are made more jarring by the fact that the A.G. had worked to position himself as one of the most prominent antagonists of the Trump administration and the Republican Party. “The founders actually were concerned about the prospect of a president becoming too much of a tyrant,” he told me in an interview in the weeks following Donald Trump’s election, saying in no uncertain terms that he intended to use the power of the New York attorney general’s office to fight the Trump administration. “A lot of the power under the constitution is still left to the states,” he added. “The states are the essential unit of government, and we do have the ability to protect our people from overreach.”

Schneiderman’s public person, however, reportedly masked violent private behaviors. Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam told the magazine that Schneiderman choked and hit them throughout their romantic relationships, resulting in injuries for which they sought medical treatment. A third woman described similar conduct. And another woman described an episode in which Schneiderman slapped her hard across the face after she rebuffed his advances. The women also described a troubling pattern of behavior by Schneiderman, including drinking and verbal and emotional abuse. In a statement, Schneiderman said, “In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.” (While none of the women filed police reports against Schneiderman, they described the violence as nonconsensual.)

Over the years, Schneiderman has built a reputation as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, even introducing a bill in the State Legislature in 2010 that made life-threatening, intentional strangulation a violent felony. “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,” Selvaratnam told The New Yorker. “How can you put a perpetrator in charge of the country’s most important sexual-assault case?” Manning Barish agreed. “His hypocrisy is epic,” she said. “He’s fooled so many people.”