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She was the first to complain of sexual harassment in Albany — and the first to be paid off with your money by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, just to shut up.
Nice try, Shelly.
Charmian Neary landed in the state capital back in 1990 as a dewy-eyed legislative aide. She had no idea that she was entering a viper pit.
Petite, blond and woefully inexperienced, she claims her former boss, Democratic Manhattan Assemblyman Mark Alan Siegel, propositioned her and made inappropriate advances.
Remember, the phrase “sexual harassment” had yet to hit the national consciousness, and women working in Albany were expected to lie back and take it.
“I didn’t kick him in the groin,’’ said Neary, 53, of Westchester.
Maybe she should have. She was fired anyway, she said, when she wouldn’t play ball.
Neary was the star witness in then-Gov. Mario Cuomo’s landmark 1992 hearing of the Governor’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Describing intimate matters was humiliating. All the worse because nothing changed.
But in 1995, Silver, who was appointed speaker a year earlier, arranged to pay Neary $85,000 in state taxpayer money to settle a civil suit against the Assembly and Siegel.
When I reached him in Florida, Siegel, 69, cheerfully denied the charges. Neary was paid off “because it’s expensive to defend these things,” he said. “Look at Bill Clinton!” It isn’t over.
Harassment, which has scarred the state Capitol at least since I was an intern in the ’80s, has spread like a virus. A million gropes after Neary, Albany remains a world stuck in the “Mad Men” era, where hair is big, skirts are short, and women who care about advancing their careers are considered easy prey by despicable men, most of them married.
This past week, Neary woke up to news that made her crawl back into bed, wiped out by “outrage fatigue.” After decades of harassment training and sexually based legislation, after years in which men in the state Legislature were warned by winking higher-ups to keep their filthy paws off young staffers and starving interns, Albany is still a sexual sewer.
Two eye-popping reports give brutal insight to Albany’s slimy inner workings. Touchy-feely Assemblyman Vito Lopez, 71 — who was, outrageously, spared criminal prosecution — was painted as a pervert. Sick with cancer, he grabbed young women, and ordered them to give him lascivious massages. Then he threatened the careers of ladies who tried to leave his employ, according to reports by the special prosecutor, Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, and by the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics.
But Silver, who arranged a hush-hush $103,080 taxpayer-paid settlement to two of Lopez’s victims (more have since come forward) was Donovan’s special punching bag.
Silver, wrote Donovan, virtually created the sexual cesspool by covering up for slimy guys. The speaker tacitly encouraged Lopez to continue molesting women, without fear of punishment, while turning his attention to his chief interest — covering his own butt.
Facing expulsion from the Assembly, Lopez told Silver in writing this weekend that he’s resigning his post, effective today.
Lopez “is such a disgusting individual,” said Neary. “But he’s a sick, old man. I’m angrier at the men and women around him. A sexual predator ran free in their own house!”
This isn’t the first time Silver has covered up sexual outrages. Should he remain in office — and this guy has the staying power of a cockroach — I doubt it will be the last.
In 2001, his top legal aide, J. Michael Boxley, was accused of date-raping Elizabeth Crothers, then 25, who brought her complaint internally to the Assembly. Big mistake.
Silver’s response? He defended Boxley as “a man of the highest integrity and of the highest character.” It came as no surprise that the Assembly dismissed the allegations. But then two years later, Boxley was hauled from the state Capitol in handcuffs, charged with sexually assaulting a 22-year-old woman. He pleaded to a wrist-slap charge of sexual misconduct, and spent not a day in jail.
That woman, who’s never put her name out publicly, cried as she told me in 2008 about waking up in her bedroom (she believed Boxley drugged her) and begging Boxley to get off her.
“I freaked out,” she said. “I was shaking and crying. You think you get past it, but that fear hides inside of you. You’re depressed, you’re furious, you’re angry, you want revenge.”
In a deal ironically directed by then-Attorney General (and later Love Gov) Eliot Spitzer, she settled a lawsuit against Silver and Boxley for $507,500, almost all in taxpayer money. Crothers got squat.
“I was wrong about Michael Boxley,” Spitzer said later, adding that, “as a father and a grandfather,” he felt “tremendous anguish” about what Crothers went through. Today, Boxley is back in Albany as a lobbyist.
Will things ever change?
Until Silver is thrown out of Albany, they never will.
Juice plays ‘wide’ out
After more than four years in a Las Vegas prison, O.J. Simpson, 65, appeared in court last week with an impressive set of man boobs to plead for the dismissal of his 2008 convictions for armed robbery and kidnapping. Acquitted in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife and her friend, O.J. has ballooned to 270 pounds by chowing down on chili and potato chips from the prison commissary, said a pal.
O.J. testified that he was hammered on bloody marys and Jack Daniels when he and five accomplices held up two sports-memorabilia dealers in 2007, and suggested his former lawyer Yale Galanter messed up by, among other things, not bringing up the juicing as a defense, and by telling O.J. he was entitled to the memorabilia he grabbed — a claim Galanter denied. He testified O.J. lied when he said he didn’t know his cohorts packed guns. In prison interviews, O.J. blamed his convictions on a racist jury.
O.J. should serve his full nine- to 33-year sentence before he explodes.
Blowing smoke
Only in New York. Residents of the 650-unit Zeckendorf Towers condominium near Union Square voted to ban cigarette smoking, making it the largest residential building in the country to go smoke-free.
But the 16 percent of home owners who failed to vote for the ban now will create billowing clouds of smoke just outside the door. It’s not fair.
Lower the curtain on this peep creep
Creepy “artist” Arne Svenson secretly photographed strangers through windows of their luxury Tribeca building, catching them bending over, cleaning or taking children to bed.
Svenson, who doesn’t show full faces, is selling the shots for up to $7,500 each in a Chelsea gallery.
“They are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high,” he wrote in a ridiculous artist’s statement.
Sue this guy if you have to. Make him stop.
Boohoo, Bernie
In a collect call from prison, Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, 75, told CNNMoney that he blames himself for the 2010 suicide of his son Mark, 46. Then he whined about the loss of his former high-flying life, and drudgery behind bars.
And the victims he ruined?
Bernie is incapable of showing concern for anyone but himself.