Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to accuse Gov. Cuomo of sexual harassment, plans to sue him and his advisors for retaliating against her, report says

• In December, Lindsey Boylan accused Gov. Cuomo of kissing her without her consent in 2018.
• A new report from the NY AG has found that Cuomo's team worked to discredit her at the time.
• Boylan's lawyer told The New York Times they are suing Cuomo and his advisors over those efforts.

Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to publicly accuse New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, plans to sue him and his team for trying to smear her name, her lawyer has told The New York Times.

In December, Boylan, who worked as an aide to Cuomo between 2015 and 2018, accused the governor of kissing her without her consent. Cuomo denies the allegation.

On Wednesday, Boylan's lawyer said they would be suing Cuomo and his close advisors following the release on Tuesday of a report from the New York Attorney General which found that Cuomo's office worked to discredit Boylan after she went public.

"Because Lindsey was first, the governor needed to send a message," Boylan's lawyer, Jill Basinger, told The Times. "He needed to send a message to every other survivor out there that this is what happens when you go against the machine of the governor's office."

Cuomo's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

According to the Attorney General's report, Cuomo's staff "engaged in a series of responsive actions that were intended to discredit and disparage Ms. Boylan."

In one case, Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo's top aide, asked Alphonso David, a lawyer who used to work for the governor, to provide her with Boylan's "full file," the report said.

David then passed the file to top Cuomo aide Rich Azzopardi, who then shared the file with journalists, the report said. "The complainants' fears of retaliation were justified," the Attorney General's office said.

The Attorney General's report found that Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 women. Cuomo has since hit back at the report, saying: "The facts are much different than what has been portrayed. One of Cuomo's lawyers also called the report "inaccurate" and "utterly biased," The Times reported.

According to the report, Boylan told investigators: "I've been sexually harassed throughout my career, but not in a way where the whole environment was set up to feed the predator and this and every interaction I had with the Governor and the culture felt like it was all to feed the predator."

"I had worked my whole life to get to a point where I would be taken seriously and I wasn't being taken seriously and I worked so hard to be some little doll for the Governor of New York and that was deeply humiliating."

Shortly after Boylan accused Cuomo of sexual assault, another former staffer, Charlotte Bennett, accused Cuomo of making sexual advances on her.

"I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared," Bennett told The Times. "And was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job."