Ethics Panel Orders Andrew Cuomo To Turn Over Book Deal Proceeds

Disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has been ordered to pay the state roughly $5.1 million in profits from his pandemic memoir following a vote by the state’s ethics panel on Tuesday.

The Joint Commission on Public Ethics, or JCOPE, voted 12-1 for Cuomo to hand over the proceeds from his book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which came out last year.

The ethics panel ruled that Cuomo, who resigned in August following a sexual harassment investigation, violated a promise not to use state resources or government staffers to prepare the book. About a month ago, the panel voted to revoke its prior approval for Cuomo to earn income from his book.

That vote followed JCOPE Commissioner David McNamara accusing Cuomo of making false statements while seeking approval from the panel to write his memoir last summer. In one instance, Cuomo’s attorney had said government personnel would not be used in the book’s creation — though by that time, members of Cuomo’s staff were already working on the book, including during normal business hours, the Albany Times Union reported.

Cuomo’s attorney, Jim McGuire, vowed to fight the panel’s latest vote.

“The commission has acted unlawfully and in violation of the governor’s constitutional rights to due process by essentially finding that he committed violations before a hearing to which anyone charged by JCOPE is entitled,” he told HuffPost. “It is baffling how the commission could discover that the content of the book was in any way improper, 14 months after the publication of the book.”

Cuomo received $3.1 million in advance from his publisher to write the book and another $2 million over the next two years, he disclosed in May.

A Cuomo spokesperson said that after taxes and expenses, Cuomo received only $1.5 million from the book last year, and that $500,000 of that was donated to a nonprofit organization. The rest of the money was said to be going to a trust fund for Cuomo’s three daughters.