New York City – Strong Attack Mailing Takes Aim at Silver

New York City – Many residents of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s Lower East Side district will soon be receiving a mailing that includes a letter from Elizabeth Crothers, the former Assembly aide who once accused a top Silver aide of rape.

Ms. Crothers has been a vocal critic of Mr. Silver during the primary campaign — she has long accused him of mishandling her case, which she pursued within the Assembly rather than through the police in Albany.

She has been an active supporter of Paul Newell, one of the two Democrats challenging Mr. Silver, though the mailings are financed by an Indianapolis-based group, the Common Sense Coalition, that said it was inspired by a recent story in The Times about Ms. Crothers.

“It’s not really a message about the race,” said Dan Perrin, co-founder of the group, which is making its first foray into New York politics. “The message is if a woman on your staff says one of your trusted staff raped me, you don’t hold a press conference and say I have complete faith and trust in my staffer. What you say is, ‘I’m going to let this investigation take its course.”

Mr. Silver is a Democrat; Mr. Perrin is a Republican activist who is also executive director of HSA Coalition, a health policy group, and former executive director of the American Taxpayers Alliance, a big business funded group that helped topple Gov. Gray Davis in California.

The Common Sense Coalition has already sent out more than 35,000 copies of the mailer.

The mailing includes excerpts from stories and editorials in The Times, The New York Post and The Daily News.

Ms. Crothers’s letter, addressed to residents of the 64th Assembly district, begins by saying she is “writing to tell you my story, one that New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver would rather you not hear…” It goes on to recount how Mr. Silver stood up for his aide, former counsel Michael Boxley, saying from the outset he would be “completely exonerated.”

The rest of the story is well-known in Albany. Two years later, Mr. Boxley was led from the Capitol in handcuffs and charged with raping another Assembly aide. He ultimately resigned and pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct under a deal that allowed him to avoid going to jail. In 2006, Mr. Silver and the Assembly leadership agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the second woman, who has never been publicly identified, accusing Mr. Silver of failing to properly investigate the Crothers case and of tolerating a culture of sexual harassment in the Assembly.

Ms. Crothers, in concluding her letter, said it was not “another sex scandal. Rather, it’s about abuse of power.”

Jonathan Rosen, a spokesman for Mr. Silver’s campaign, said, “it’s sad that a shady right-wing state organization that refuses to disclose its donors is attempting to inject gutter politics into this campaign.”