Queens Council Member Faces Discipline Over Sexual Harassment Complaint

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said he removed a member of the Council’s budget negotiating team in connection with an incident of alleged sexual harassment.

The move followed a meeting on Thursday of the Council’s Committee on Standards and Ethics which voted to begin disciplinary proceedings against Barry Grodenchik, who represents parts of Eastern Queens including Bayside, Little Neck and Queens Village, for violating the Council’s anti-discrimination and harassment policy.

“No one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable in the workplace and singled out for unwanted attention,” Johnson said in a statement. “The Standards & Ethics Committee investigated and deliberated over this matter very carefully. In light of their decision to formally charge Council Member Grodenchik and launch disciplinary proceedings against him, I am immediately removing him from the Budget Negotiating Team, pending the results of the disciplinary hearing,” he added.

After the committee's closed session, Committee Chair Steven Matteo read a summary which included details of the complaint against Grodenchik.

The Council member was accused of paying “unwelcome attention” to a staff member over the course of a year. That attention included, “engaging in a dialogue about the staffer’s weight that made the staffer uncomfortable, repeatedly greeting only this particular staffer with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and finally making the staffer uncomfortable at a work meeting attended by several other people by blowing a kiss at the staffer across the table and then when the meeting concluded walking around the table to give the staffer a hug and a kiss, while not doing this to any other participants at the meeting.”

The Committee now will recommend its own discipline for Grodenchik.

For his part, the Council member issued his own lengthy statement, incorrectly saying that he had been removed from his position as chair of Parks and Recreation Committee (though that is an action that could be recommended down the line).

Grodenchick acknowledged one moment when he may have, “briefly shook hands and hugged several people” after a Council meeting in January. While he offered an apology, Grodenchik also called for “common sense and reasonableness" about someone's intentions and actions.

"It is never my intention to make any person feel uncomfortable, and I sincerely apologize if my actions had that effect. For me, as is true for many of my colleagues, a hug is a common greeting for people I have known for a long time, but as others do not feel that way, I will certainly be more sensitive to that in the future.

That being said, the Speaker's actions in my case are an over-reaction, with an excessive punishment that is harmful to this body. Harassment is a real issue that we need to address, but we have to have some common sense and reasonableness about what is intended by someone's actions. While we need to change some traditional behavior, we must do so without punishing people for being human and without ruining lives and careers.

I have spent over 25 years in public service. For nearly two decades of that time, I worked for four amazing and strong women. Those women included an Assemblywoman and three Presidents of the Borough of Queens. My only goal has always been to simply help people. During my career, I have supervised over a hundred people, including dozens of women, and I have never in those three decades been accused of any misdeeds. I will certainly take the lesson of what has been brought to my attention and use it to grow as a person, but I will not allow the good name my parents gave to me to be dragged through the mud for this single action which, as the Speaker well knows, was never intended to make anyone uncomfortable.

I now ask my colleagues to recognize that my work and my long advocacy for women, including organizing conferences for victims of domestic violence, demonstrate my true commitment to equality, and I ask those colleagues stand up for me and reject the Speaker's attempts to remove me from my Committee Chair."

This is the latest of several incidents to go before the Council’s Standards and Ethics Committee in recent weeks. Previous reports have cited investigations into the conduct of Council members Ruben Diaz Sr. and Mark Gjonaj. Asked at a press conference last month why there were so many incidents being referred to this committee under his leadership, Speaker Johnson was frank and unapologetic:

“Anytime anything has come to me, I have immediately said, ‘Send it to Standards and Ethics, right away, don’t delay anything, no one gets any special treatment, send it there,” said Johnson. “I think that’s the reason why you’ve seen so many of these cases.”