“He has done an outstanding job,” the mayor said of O’Brien, “particularly as we went through a very intense 2017.”
Less than three months later, O’Brien was gone. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, O’Brien was quietly forced to resign after complaints of sexual harassment filed by two female city employees were substantiated.
Yet City Hall officials did not announce his departure or the reason for it.
At least some of the harassment occurred while O’Brien, 36, was working as acting chief of staff, Eric F. Phillips, the mayor’s press secretary, said, adding that City Hall officials first became aware of the allegations in February and acted on them promptly.
“The misconduct in this case literally makes me sick to my stomach,” de Blasio said Thursday, deliberately devoting a third of his news conference to addressing O’Brien’s case, which had been reported online by The New York Times earlier in the day. “Angry does not describe my view. I am livid. I’m disgusted by what happened. I am deeply disappointed in this individual.”
De Blasio said that he had not been aware of any allegations of improper behavior against O’Brien when he praised him in November 2017 during a wider announcement of personnel actions that included moving O’Brien to a senior adviser position.
Referring to the women who accused O’Brien, the mayor said, “Let me say to them I am deeply sorry; I am deeply sorry this happened on our team. It shocks me, and it is absolutely inconsistent with the values of this administration.”
A report on O’Brien’s conduct prepared by the city’s Law Department and the office of the mayor’s counsel says that investigators interviewed the two women and found their statements credible. The investigators said that O’Brien’s account was found “to be not credible,” and recommended that he be “terminated from employment at the mayor’s office.”
The report, dated Feb. 13, was obtained in response to a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. It was heavily redacted, and details of the harassment allegations, including when they took place, were not included in the material provided to The Times.
But de Blasio on Thursday implied that O’Brien’s behavior had been egregious. He said that two or three other sex harassment cases had been substantiated during his administration against employees of the mayor’s office, which has about 1,000 employees, but that those cases were “nothing like this incident.”
After leaving City Hall, O’Brien went to work for Hilltop Public Solutions, a political consulting and lobbying firm founded by Nicholas R. Baldick, a close ally of the mayor who initially recommended O’Brien to City Hall.
O’Brien’s ouster in February came at a delicate moment for City Hall, as the national #MeToo movement focused attention on sexual harassment, and de Blasio at the time struggled to answer questions about how his administration handled harassment complaints.
Administration officials, after months of delays, eventually released data on the sexual harassment complaints filed against city employees: From mid-2013 through 2017, there were 1,312 such complaints lodged at all city agencies, with 221 substantiated, the city said at the time. Those substantiated claims were said to involve as many as five mayor’s office employees. But the administration gave no details and did not identify the workers.
The report on O’Brien states that because the two complainants requested anonymity, their names and identifying information were omitted from the document.
The first assistant corporation counsel, Georgia Pestana, who was one of the authors of the investigative report, said the circumstances of O’Brien’s departure were kept private to protect his accusers.
“The privacy interest of these women was paramount,” Pestana said, sitting beside the mayor Thursday in City Hall’s Blue Room. “If you don’t create a space where people can believe us when we say we will hold your information and your identities confidential, women are not going to come forward.”
The Times was able to independently confirm the identity of one of the women, and is withholding her name and details about her job that could identify her because she is a victim of harassment. When contacted by The Times, the woman, who is younger than O’Brien and was a much more junior employee, declined to speak about the case.
“The complaint alleges sexual harassment in violation of the city’s equal employment opportunity policy,” the report said.
“Determination: After investigation, the allegations of sexual harassment are substantiated,” the report concluded. Referring to O’Brien, it said: “It is recommended that the respondent be terminated from employment at the mayor’s office.”
Phillips said that O’Brien, whose portfolio as senior adviser — after his stint as acting chief of staff — included issues like the opioid crisis and mental health initiatives, was forced to resign within a day or two of the report’s completion. He said the decision to ask for O’Brien’s resignation was made by the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, and Emma Wolfe, O’Brien’s replacement as chief of staff.
However, a resignation form signed by O’Brien and obtained by The Times is dated March 23, which coincides with the date of O’Brien’s final paycheck. Phillips said that O’Brien continued to be paid for several weeks to account for unused vacation days. He was paid a salary of $220,652 a year, according to city records. Only about 10 people in the mayor’s office had higher salaries.
O’Brien, who is married, blamed his actions on alcohol.
“There’s no excuse for what I’ve done; I’m embarrassed and ashamed,” O’Brien said in a written statement. “At an after-work event, I drank too much and acted inappropriately. No one deserves to be treated that way. I’ve apologized to the people I’ve hurt and will continue to do so because I am truly sorry.
“My use of alcohol has led me to make horrible decisions,” he said, adding that he was getting “professional help.”
On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Hilltop said that O’Brien had taken a leave of absence. On Thursday, Baldick said he had been fired.
“We weren’t aware of the allegations when we hired him,” Baldick said in an email. “When I learned more about the full scope of Kevin’s actions today, I asked him to leave the firm.”
The company has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for work for de Blasio’s mayoral campaigns and for the Campaign for One New York, a defunct nonprofit the mayor had used to support his agenda.
Hilltop had listed O’Brien on its website as a principal in its New York office. That webpage was taken down Wednesday; it had previously chronicled O’Brien’s experience in politics, saying that he had “helped campaigns and causes survive and communicate through crisis.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.