Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s longtime deputy chief of staff, Anne Bradley, is leaving her Senate office next month, according to a person familiar with her plans.
Bradley has been with Gillibrand since 2007 and had been planning to retire later this year. She moved up her departure after POLITICO detailed an internal sexual harassment investigation Bradley helped lead in 2018, which ended with a young female staffer resigning in protest over how Gillibrand’s office handled the incident and the post-investigation fallout.
Bradley’s exit comes at a critical moment for Gillibrand. The New York Democrat officially announced her candidacy for president Sunday, after a two-month exploratory period, and has scheduled a kickoff speech outside a Trump hotel in New York City on March 24.
A Gillibrand spokesperson declined to comment.
Gillibrand told reporters last week she had no regrets about how the episode was handled, but she told The Hill last weekend that “where we did see some human error was post-investigation.”
Bradley and Gillibrand’s general counsel, Keith Castaldo, took the lead on the sexual harassment investigation last summer, along with Gillibrand’s former chief of staff, Jess Fassler — who now manages Gillibrand’s presidential campaign. CNN reported last week that Bradley’s role had been restructured and would no longer include handling such investigations and personnel cases. The Gillibrand spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
A young female aide in Gillibrand’s office alleged last summer that Gillibrand’s longtime driver, Abbas Malik, made unwelcome sexual advances shortly after the senator told Malik he would be put into a supervisory role over her. The woman also told her superiors that Malik made repeated demeaning remarks about other women in the office.
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SOURCE: Politico, Alex Thompson
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