So far, a half-dozen women have accused state Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak of creating a hostile working environment through the sort of lewd comments and loutish behavior that makes the monstrous Mr. Hyde look like poor, placid Dr. Jekyll.
Because my deadline falls on Friday, it's possible that more women have come forward in the gap between this writing and publication. If that is the case, I apologize — which is more than anyone has heard from Gabryszak, who through his lawyer has said that he'll respond to the barrage of accusations in due course.
No doubt concerned that the scandal will hang over his State of the State like a belch at a christening, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others have called on Gabryszak to either offer a defense or make himself scarce from Albany for the duration, or forevermore.
The charges against the Western New York Democrat raise a number of questions — a few of them cultural, more of them political, and lots of them legal. Such as:
What in the world is going on in the state Assembly? As the 2014 legislative session begins, it's worth noting that we have to go back almost 18 months to find a time when the chamber wasn't bedeviled by a publicly revealed sexual harassment scandal involving a lawmaker allegedly abusing staff members.
August 2012 kicked off the Vito Lopez saga, which ended the following May with his forced resignation. July brought the revelation that Assemblyman Micah Kellner had been accused in 2009 of making inappropriate comments to a female staff member, whose complaint to a top Assembly lawyer went nowhere.
The Daily News subsequently reported that Kellner, who previously identified himself as bisexual, made similar comments to a male member of his staff. (This is not the sort of story about gender-identity politics that anyone would describe as "pioneering," though it's certainly groundbreaking.)
Two weeks ago, the first three complaints against Gabryszak were filed. A week later, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver accepted the recommendations of the chamber's Ethics and Guidance Committee laying out Kellner's punishment, including stripping him of a committee chairmanship and sending him a stern letter. Kellner disputes those findings and is prepared to contest them in a public hearing.
My child was just accepted as a legislative intern. Should I be concerned? I would say yes, unless your son or daughter has been raised to defend her- or himself at the first sign of trouble — legally and administratively, and perhaps through the application of the beautiful but pitiless art of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
This May, the Assembly will mark the 10-year anniversary of its adoption of a rule barring fraternization with student interns.
That same decade, however, has brought a succession of scandals involving assemblymen (and yes, all of them are men) who seem to lose all control around young folks: The careers of Ryan Karben, Mike Cole and Sam Hoyt were hobbled or outright destroyed by such episodes — although Hoyt, whose liaison with an intern began when she was 23, was brought on board by Gov. Andrew Cuomo a few years after the affair came to light to work on regional economic development.
Like Hoyt, Lopez and Kellner before him, Gabryszak is now barred from employing interns.
Is Gabryszak's alleged tattoo claim a physical impossibility? According to the complaint of 26-year-old Kimberly Snickles, who lasted five months as his communications director, Gabryszak deemed it appropriate to tell her that not only was he "more of a butt guy than a boobs guy," but that he had a tattoo on his penis.
To see if this was even possible, I called the local tattoo parlor where I've had my own college-era bad-idea bicep work touched up. Needless to say, the employee who answered the phone was a woman.
I explained l'affair Gabryszak to her with as much tact as I could muster. She calmly assured me that such things were possible, though "not a lot of tattooists do it. ... It doesn't really come up that often."
How much of my disgust over these scandals should be directed at Albany? Whoa there, chum — Albany is a city Do you work for The New York Times editorial board or something? But if you mean "Albany" as shorthand for "state government," there are two schools of thought.
The first holds that the state Legislature is no more or less corrupt or sleazy than the society that surrounds it. We suffer from sexual harassment in academia, the corporate realm and the military, so should we be surprised that this scourge afflicts the corridors of political power?
But the other argument holds that legislative service is meant to attract the best in our community, or at least not the worst. This is why the process through which these jobs are won is called "election."
How do I pronounce this guy's name? Glad you asked, because the past two weeks have brought some truly memorable mispronunciations of Assemblyman GAA-brih-zack's last name, including "Gabberzack," "Gabreezack" and — a personal favorite for all the wrong reasons — "Grabbersack."
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619