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SEX AND THE CAPITAL: IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

WHEN it comes to sex and the state capital, some things never change.

Back when I was a college student – smart, ambitious and woefully inexperienced, although I’d never admit it – I was thrust into the sexual mosh pit in Albany, sometimes referred to as the New York state Legislature.

This was the early ’80s, when skirts were short, nothing was incurable and the term “sexual harassment” had yet to be minted. The good ol’ days.

I was part of the annual crop of painfully young girls – some away from home for the first time in their lives – that landed in Albany for the legislative session, seeking job experience and education.

Education we got. Just not the kind for which Daddy pays tuition.

It was at a lobbyist’s cocktail party – the nightly ritual in which starving interns lapped up professional contacts along with free booze and food, and married men sought sustenance of another persuasion. It was there I met an assemblyman from New York City.

Over chilled shrimp and a bottomless glass of vodka, the guy offered me a rare job that paid real money.

For $300 a week, a tidy sum for that time and place, I wrote his newsletters. And listened to his numbingly long stories. And accompanied him, in high heels, whenever my boss, who was lazy and uninterested in routine chores of governance, whiningly entered the Assembly floor to cast a vote.

Then one day, right in the historic Capitol building, he made his move. Good thing he was short. It would be a quick trip to the ground after I decked him.

The next morning, he fired me.

Funny. In the ways of Albany, circa 1980-something, when girls sought success on their backs, or their knees, and even my professors spoke approvingly of them, it was I who had failed. It never even occurred to me to complain.

I first told this story in 1992. That was when legislative aide Charmian Neary made many a horny legislator squirm in his loafers after she accused her former boss of sexual harassment.

Now it seems some Albany customs are as resistant to a cure as rising taxes.

Today, J. Michael Boxley, counsel to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, is accused of raping a woman he drove home from a bar. This, two years after another former Assembly staffer, Elizabeth Crothers, also accused Boxley of rape. Crothers told The Post’s Fred Dicker that Silver ignored her allegation, merely ordering Boxley to steer clear of Albany’s intern-filled bars.

We’ve lived through a decade of anti-harassment legislation, endless lectures and sensitivity training. The state is in budget hell.

And still, your public servants party like it’s 1982.