A Democrat New York Assemblyman’s former legislative director is accusing him of sexual harassment as well as making inappropriate claims about his son’s underage sexual encounters, the New York Post reported on Friday.
The former legislative director, Nicole Golias, filed the complaint against 38-year-old Assemblyman Pat Burke (D-Buffalo) on April 1 with the New York Division of Human Rights after she and two other staffers were fired last year amid an internal controversy regarding Burke’s response to the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting, according to the report.
In the complaint, Golias alleges that Burke “made comments about his son’s sexual encounters after viewing some of his son’s video tapes.”
“He said the girls in the videos were ‘hot and it didn’t matter that they were under aged [sic],'” according to the complaint, which was first reported by the Buffalo News. “He said, ‘if she has big boobs, a size zero waist and a huge ass, she’s hot.’”
Golias further alleged that Burke called himself a “colonizer” and said he had “control and dominion over his wife because he is Caucasian and his wife is Puerto Rican.”
Golias, who worked for Burke for less than a year before being fired, also claims Burke “had conversations with my male co-workers about the genitals of the man I was dating.”
“He would do anything he could to appear cool and attractive,” Golias told the Buffalo News, which noted that the Assembly is conducting an investigation of the accusations. “And I don’t know if he was trying to convince others or himself. But it ended up just veering into entirely inappropriate behavior.”
Burke told The Post on Friday that he found the allegations “extremely upsetting.”
“You’re talking about people who lack credibility. There’s very clear, ample evidence that they lack credibility. In the end, there’s no evidence other than what they’re saying, that I carried on this way,” he said, before accusing Golias and his former community relations director Matt Dearing of being the ones to create an unprofessional work environment.
“This is just [the] latest action by them for revenge for being caught,” Burke added. “The accusations are outrageous and salacious. That they bring my child into this, attempting to cause harm, is extremely upsetting.”
Burke also allegedly provided documents to the publication, showing that the trio of fired employees made inappropriate jokes, “including on official Assembly stationery,” according to the report, which noted that the authenticity of the documents could not be immediately verified.
Dearing, who is running for local office, allegedly told The Post that he saw behavior from Burke that Golias described in the complaint. Golias did not return the publication’s request for comment.
“He was a bartender before he ever got elected,” Dearing said. “That’s not a shade on bartenders, by any means. But I think he came from a particular environment culturally where those sorts of comments were OK and he doesn’t know how to turn it off in settings where people aren’t OK with that.”
Dearing noted that the complaint is interesting, given that Burke was one of the first Democrat lawmakers to call for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to step down after accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced.