NEW YORK — When Mayor Bill de Blasio first addressed a scandal over a former top aide who was allowed to quietly resign over sexual harassment complaints, he said then that he was “deeply sorry” that such behavior had occurred in his administration.
But on Wednesday, the mayor used far sharper words to blame the former aide’s previous employer, the Democratic Governors Association, for failing to disclose a sexual harassment case that had led to his dismissal from the organization.
During a background check of the former aide, Kevin O’Brien, the association “affirmatively stated that there was no adverse information on this individual,” according to a statement from the Department of Investigation, which conducted the check. O’Brien then landed a senior job at City Hall.
“As a Democrat, it’s very troubling to me,” de Blasio said. “They should have said to us, ‘Yes, there was a problem.’ They should have said, point blank, ‘Yes, there was a problem.’ And that would have caused us not to hire him.”
O’Brien, a former aide to Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, had worked at the governors association for less than a year when he was pushed out over the sexual harassment charge in December 2015.
Within weeks, he was hired in New York, eventually becoming acting chief of staff and then a senior adviser to de Blasio. After two women filed sex harassment complaints against O’Brien in February 2018, and the claims were substantiated, O’Brien was allowed to quietly resign.
His departure was not made public, and he quickly found a new job with Hilltop Public Solutions, a political consulting firm close to Bullock and de Blasio.
Bullock also knew of the sexual harassment case at the association, which occurred while he was chairman of the organization; he, too, apparently said nothing to de Blasio, even though he visited Gracie Mansion in 2017, a meeting attended by O’Brien.
“I don’t know if there were any extenuating circumstances that the governor was addressing, like confidentiality issues from the complainants,” de Blasio said. “But it’s personally frustrating. If I had known, we clearly would not have hired him. It’s as simple as that.”
De Blasio said he did not see any parallels between the way that the governors association and the mayor’s office handled the sexual harassment cases involving O’Brien.
In both cases, O’Brien was allowed to leave his job without any public disclosure of his misdeeds, and quickly landed a new job without anyone warning his next employer.
De Blasio has said that the city did not make the sexual harassment case against O’Brien public in order to protect the privacy of the two women who had filed the complaints. He also said that he did know until recently that O’Brien had been hired by Hilltop, which did not make a reference check with the city.
De Blasio said that if any potential employer had asked the city for a reference, they would have been told that O’Brien resigned in lieu of termination, which the mayor said would have been a clear red flag.
But Nicholas Baldick, the founder and managing partner of Hilltop, said this week that within two months of O’Brien’s move to Hilltop, senior City Hall employees, including Emma Wolfe, the mayor’s chief of staff, were aware of the hiring. Wolfe also knew of O’Brien’s sexual harassment case and had been involved in the decision to terminate his employment.
But she never informed Baldick of the harassment case, or that O’Brien had resigned to keep from being fired.
“His eventual employer asked nothing of us and I was prohibited by our lawyers and by the complainants’ wishes from sharing anything about these complaints,” Wolfe said in an emailed statement. “We did the best we could in a highly imperfect situation.”
Baldick has been one of de Blasio’s top political advisers, and had recommended O’Brien to the mayor.
“He was a great writer, he wrote good campaign plans, seemed to be a good strategist,” Baldick said, adding that he knew nothing about the sexual harassment charges until news reports this month.
“Most of the people who worked with him on the campaigns thought he was really talented and, to be honest, just like me, were shocked and appalled.”
De Blasio also said Wednesday that he would ask city lawyers to consider whether to seek criminal charges against O’Brien for providing false information on a background check questionnaire.
Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chairwoman of the governors association, was not available for an interview, according to the group’s communications director, Jared Leopold, who added that the association did not have a response to the mayor’s comments. Several other Democratic governors, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, also did not respond to requests for comment.
Bullock initially provided a statement indicating that he agreed with the decision to terminate O’Brien’s employment at the governors association, and that he was “deeply troubled” that O’Brien had run into similar trouble in New York.
But the governor, who has been considering running for president in 2020, has refused to be interviewed and would not respond Wednesday to questions, including why he did not tell city officials about O’Brien’s sexual harassment case.
“The governor has no additional comments,” his spokeswoman, Ronja Abel, said in an email.
Baldick has also worked closely with Bullock, and he got to know O’Brien over several years when his company worked on Bullock’s campaigns in Montana. He said that he was impressed with his work, and so when O’Brien asked for help getting a job in New York City, Baldick did so.
Baldick said that he often talked to O’Brien during the mayor’s re-election campaign in 2017, and when O’Brien came to him in early 2018 to ask for a job, he hired him without speaking to the mayor or making a formal reference check.
“As it turns out, obviously, lots of people have been lied to here and we were lied to a lot,” Baldick said. “I guess now, lesson learned, even when you’ve known someone for 10 years, you should do a direct reference check.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.