New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been embroiled in a series of controversies this year, some relating to his personal behavior and others to his performance as governor.

The Cuomo administration has faced accusations that it improperly sent hospitalized COVID-19 patients back to their nursing homes during the early months of the pandemic, thereby increasing the spread of the virus among a particularly vulnerable population.

As journalists and lawmakers sought to learn the death toll from New York’s nursing homes, the administration was reluctant to offer complete clarity; the numbers that were issued through much of 2020 omitted nursing home residents who died in hospitals.

Cuomo’s political opponents called this lack of clarity a cover-up intended to burnish the governor’s reputation at a time when he was working on a book about leadership during the pandemic. And the book itself became a source of controversy when reports emerged that members of Cuomo’s staff helped in preparing it.

The Cuomo administration has insisted that there was no cover-up and that its actions were all in accordance with instructions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An entirely new scandal began to unfold for Cuomo in late 2020 when a former aide accused the governor of sexual harassment when she worked for him. In the early months of 2021, more former aides and even a current worker at the governor’s executive mansion made complaints about his behavior, sparking even Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, to call for Cuomo to step down.

An impeachment probe is currently ongoing in the Assembly, although Republican lawmakers are skeptical that Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a longtime Cuomo ally, will actually bring impeachment up for a vote in the chamber.

Cuomo, for his part, has denied the allegations, insisting that his friendly nature was mistaken for something else.

Below is a look back at how these stories and other recent controversies unfolded, told through The Center Square’s coverage of Albany and the Cuomo administration:

This article was originally posted on A timeline of recent controversies embroiling the Cuomo administration