Bennett’s story is all the more believable because we’ve heard it before. It’s got all the moves from the Albany harassment best-practices playbook. Perhaps most galling is the way Cuomo—the not-the-Onion founder of the Women’s Equality Party!—got creepily, aggressively interested in her past sexual assault experience. “The way he was repeating, ‘You were raped and abused and attacked and assaulted and betrayed,’ over and over again while looking me directly in the eyes was something out of a horror movie. It was like he was testing me,” she texted a male colleague after one meeting with the governor. Vito Lopez, infamously the scourge of Albany, did the same with at least one of his victims, Leah Hebert. Hebert believes these power-mongers target those who have been abused in the past because they’re counting on being able to use that to discredit their victim…

Someone asked me why Cuomo didn’t deny Bennett’s allegations, after he put out a statement categorically denying those made days earlier by Lindsey Boylan, who his staff then demeaned on background calls. I speculated that the optics of treating an unknown 25-year-old the same way they did an older married woman with political aspirations were obviously different. But mostly I think Cuomo is counting on people to be okay with him treating a young woman this way. I think he assumes that no one is going to care that a hardworking person was objectified, uncomfortable and had to change jobs because he couldn’t behave professionally. I’m guessing he thinks people will believe that this kind of behavior constitutes “mentoring,” or at least act like they believe that.

It doesn’t. And frankly, he and his staff know it.