Cuomo demands $8.6M payback from sexual harassment accuser Trooper 1, calls her lawsuit patently frivolous

Former Gov.Andrew Cuomo is trying to toss the bombshell sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a state trooper on his detail — claiming her claims were part of a conspiracy within the state police force to attack him while he was in office.Cuomo finally filed a formal response Monday to the Brooklyn federal court suit brought three years ago by an anonymous woman known as Trooper 1 — demanding that she pay back the $8.6 million in taxpayer-funded legal fees used so far for his defense.“Trooper 1’s allegations against him are false and were part and parcel of a plan to attack Governor Cuomo that Trooper 1 and other members of the NYSP planned, coordinated, and executed because they were disgruntled with Governor Cuomo for reasons entirely unrelated to any purported harassment or retaliation,” the filing states.Cuomo — who resigned in disgrace in 2021 and is now running for New York City mayor — hasn’t paid a dime of his own money on legal fees in any of the sprawling litigation associated with his administration, which the state comptroller’s office reports now exceeds $61 million.But his filing asks for him to be awarded “interest, attorney’s fees, costs, and disbursements, as permitted by law or statute.”Cuomo also asks the judge to dismiss the suit “with prejudice,” meaning that the claims could not be refiled at a later date, while blasting the allegations as “wholly unreliable and false hearsay.”The court already tossed a retaliation claim from Trooper 1’s complaint, which was first filed in 2022, but her core accusations of sexual harassment remain.The trooper said Cuomo asked for her to be transferred to his detail after the two met at a 2017 presser on the RFK bridge and she began working for him the following year before being moved to his travel team in 2019.Her suit claims that Cuomo touched her stomach and back — and kissed her on the cheek — while she was on the job in 2019, among other undesirable behavior. Trooper ...