OUTRAGE: Chloe Rivera (left) and Victoria Burhans are suing ex-Assemblyman Vito Lopez, while Speaker Sheldon Silver is being sued for authorizing hush money. (Tamara Beckwith/NY Post)
OUTRAGE: Chloe Rivera (left) and Victoria Burhans are suing ex-Assemblyman Vito Lopez, while Speaker Sheldon Silver (right) is being sued for authorizing hush money. (
)
ALBANY — The taxpayers want their money back, Shelly.
An Albany activist is suing Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver over the $103,000 secret settlement he authorized to pay off two former female staffers who accused pervy ex- Assemblyman Vito Lopez of sexual harassment.
The Albany Supreme Court lawsuit argues that the settlement violated the state Constitution.
“The prohibition regarding the use of public funds in aid of private undertakings is very clear,” said small-government activist Robert Schultz, with the We The People of New York group. “Mr. Silver has admitted he did not handle the matter [sex-harassment allegations] properly.
“The money belongs to the taxpayers of this state and had no business being used for this purpose. Our elected officials take an oath to obey the New York state and federal Constitutions.”
The suit calls for Silver to repay the full sum, plus 10 percent interest, dating to June 2012, “directly from his personal funds” within 20 days.
Additionally, it asks the court for unspecified punitive damages to serve as a deterrent to stop other legislators from making future secret settlements.
The lawsuit comes a week after another two former Lopez staffers sued Lopez, Silver and the Assembly in federal court.
The second set of women said they never would have gone to work for Lopez had they known about past sexual-harassment complaints.
Months before Lopez hired the second set of women, Silver and his senior staff learned that at least two other women on Lopez’s staff had credibly complained that he had sexually harassed them and other employees.
All four women were mentioned in a 70-page, scathing report released last month by the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which detailed Lopez’s lewd advances and Silver’s role in covering it up.
The JCOPE report found that Lopez gave women in his office cash to buy sexy clothes, tried to share hotel rooms, ordered massages and in some cases groped them.
JCOPE and Staten Island DA Dan Donovan — the special prosecutor who did not charge Lopez with a crime — also excoriated Silver for paying the $103,000 hush-money settlement and never forwarding the complaints to the Assembly Ethics Committee to investigate.
Lopez has denied any harassment. He resigned in disgrace from the Assembly last month, but only after he was threatened with expulsion. He’s now running for a City Council seat from Brooklyn.
The Legislative Ethics Commission this week formally fined him $330,000.
Silver has apologized for his initial secrecy and proposed legislation to stop similar hush-money payments in the future, but he has refused to step down from the leadership perch he has held for nearly 20 years.
A spokesman for Silver had no comment on the Schultz lawsuit, which was filed yesterday. Silver has 20 days to respond.