The New York state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying In Government (COELIG) has closed the case into allegations against former state Sen. Jeff Klein for sexual harassment by a former staffer, the ethics panel said Friday.
In a 2018 interview with The Huffington Post, former state Senate employee Erica Vladimer claimed that Klein forcibly kissed her outside a bar in Albany in 2015. Vladimer left her job just a few months later. Klein has denied those allegations since they came forward.
COELIG held a hearing in June of this year on those complaints.
“After reviewing the full hearing record and discussing the Katter at length, the Commission voted not to issue a Substantial Basis Investigation Report and close the case,” COELIG wrote in a letter to Klein, dated Nov. 19, that was released Friday as a matter of being in the public interest.
The panel did say, however, that their decision “should not be read as an approval” of the way Klein handled the complaint, citing records saying he failed to comply with state Senate harassment policy.
Vladimer criticized the panel’s decision, which decided 5-2 that there was sufficient evidence that Klein had kissed her without her consent, while voting 2-5 that there was sufficient evidence that a single kiss occurred and was rejected by Vladimer. A Substantial Basis Investigation Report requires at least six votes in the affirmative to those questions.
“Let me be clear: this is not a win for Klein, who unequivocally sexually harassed me and then spent years desperately attempting to evade the inevitable conclusion,” Vladimer said in a statement. “A determination should’ve left me feeling vindicated and affirmed. Instead, I am livid and disconsolate. For more than seven years, I have done everything humanly possible to work within the state ethics system to hold Klein accountable. State employees demand better from our public officials and from the oversight body that supposedly governs their conduct. I am more determined than ever to fix our deeply broken, fundamentally failing system.”
Klein, of the Bronx, served for years as the leader of the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of breakaway Democrats in the state Senate who caucused with the Republicans, effectively helping the GOP maintain control of the Senate in exchange for receiving committee leadership positions and other benefits. The group significantly impacted state politics for years until most of them were defeated in primaries in 2018. Klein himself lost the Democratic primary that year to Alessandra Biaggi.
The allegations came at the height of the “Me Too” movement when Albany saw a spate of sexual harassment claims made against state lawmakers who ultimately left the Legislature in disgrace, either by not running again for office or resigning, along with numerous powerful men in the media, politics and art world.