I’D LIKE TO HEAR LESS ABOUT GOV. PATERSON’S TRAVAILS AND MORE ABOUT THE BRONX MOM WHOSE DESPERATE ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HAVE EXPOSED HIDEOUS FLAWS IN LAWS DESIGNED TO PROTECT CRIME VICTIMS.
There's no doubt Paterson is increasingly isolated and alone.
There's no question some early, rumor-based accounts were sloppy, lurid and wrong.
But he loses me when he pronounces himself a "victim" of press smears.
That loaded word is best reserved for the woman who tried to tell everybody she was beaten by Paterson's former aide David Johnson - only to see her cry for help ignored, mishandled or suppressed by one agency after another.
Johnson's ex-girlfriend told the NYPD and a Family Court referee that she was injured, afraid and subject to intimidation.
"He's like a government official, and I have problems with even calling the police because the state troopers kept calling and harassing me to drop the charges, and I wouldn't," she told the referee in November.
After which, it appears, nobody lifted a finger to help the accuser. City cops, tasked with serving an order of protection on Johnson, proved unable to do so, even though the towering 6-foot-7 aide was by the governor's side at every public appearance.
The governor's schedule is public information. Anybody could have served the papers.
The judge does not appear to have passed along the report that men with guns from a state agency were supposedly harassing a victim who appeared in her court.
The state police appear to have acted more like a private intimidation force than a professional law enforcement agency. And members of Paterson's immediate political staff - and, perhaps, the governor - may have known all of what was going on, but tried to spin or dissolve the complaint rather than face it head-on.
Bad business all around.
In a city where attacks between family members or intimate partners are an epidemic - the NYPD responds to some 650 domestic violence calls every day - it chills the blood to read about how one high-profile encounter was botched.
"The system failed this woman at every turn," said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the National Organization for Women's New York City chapter.
That's putting it mildly.
There will be plenty of time for Albany to settle back to normal, complete with petty power plays, leechlike lobbyists and ambitious pols.
Albany's haste to resume business as usual is already starting to smell like a desire to push aside the one person we already know is a victim.
So let the investigation continue. But let's keep in mind that Paterson is not the only official who owes the public an explanation - and, perhaps, a resignation.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Wednesday, March 3rd 2010 at 5:46PM
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