Hearne: Michael Bloomberg’s (Somewhat) Untold Sex Scandals

It’s early, but presidential wannabe Mike Bloomberg‘s sex scandals are starting to surfacer…

Courtesy of GQ, for starters.

Here’s how writer Laura Bassett’s story begins…

“In December 2015, employees at Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control organization funded by Mike Bloomberg, arrived at work to find a holiday gift on their desks from their employer: the former mayor’s 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Flipping through the book, staffers found themselves uncomfortably reading their billionaire founder’s boasts about ‘keeping a girlfriend in every city’ and other womanizing exploits as a Wall Street up-and-comer.

“A few people started immediately going through it and sending the cringe-iest parts around on email chains,” one former Everytown employee told me. ‘Hardly the most controversial things he’s said, but it’s still a bad look.’ ”

Moving right along…

While Bloomberg’s self touted sexual exploits may be eyebrow raising, at least there’s no evidence of uninvited crouch grabbing,. a la The Donald.

Still…

“It takes a telling amount of gall and cluelessness to gift a book with anecdotes about your own womanizing to employees at your gun safety non-profit in the year 2015, especially for a politician with presidential ambitions who has been vigorously denying allegations of misogyny throughout his entire career—including nearly 40 sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him and his organizations by 64 women over the past several decades.

“Bloomberg’s sexism, like that of fellow New York City billionaire Donald Trump has been prolific and well-documented, but for some reason, the stories about him don’t seem to have taken hold. He is still being embraced by the Democratic establishment as a viable option for its presidential nominee.”

GQ hones in on some of Bloomberg’s greatest, most scurrilous hits:

Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a former sales representative at Bloomberg LP, alleged in a 1997 lawsuit – one of four separate lawsuits in a two-year period – that when then-CEO Mike Bloomberg found out she was pregnant, he told her, “Kill it!” and “Great! Number 16!”—an apparent reference to the number of pregnant women or women on maternity leave at his company. She also alleged that when Bloomberg saw her engagement ring, he commented, “What is the guy dumb and blind? What the hell is he marrying you for?” And, that he once pointed to another female employee and told Garrison, “If you looked like that, I’d do you in a second.” Bloomberg denied having said most of those things, but reportedly left Garrison a voicemail saying that if he did say them, he “didn’t mean it.”

“Bloomberg once described his life as a single billionaire bachelor in New York City to a reporter as being a ‘wet dream. I like theater, dining and chasing women,’ he said. On a radio show in 2003, he said that he would ‘really want to have’ Jennifer Lopez, which he later explained away as wanting to ‘have dinner’ with her. A top aide said Bloomberg frequently remarked ‘nice tits’ upon seeing attractive women. In 1990, his employees put together an entire booklet of some of his more egregious comments, including, ‘If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s,’ and, of the computer terminal that made him a billionaire, ‘It will do everything, including give you [oral sex]. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.’ ”

THE BOTTOM LINE: 

Racism aside, the battle of the billionaires is shaping up as a pretty muddy proposition.

“Bloomberg’s campaign, in reckoning with his long history of toxic frat-boy behavior, is essentially asking voters to try and focus on his political values instead,” GQ concludes.

“If the Democratic Party wants to claim the moral high-ground on issues of misogyny and sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it has a moral obligation to reject as its highest leader a man who talks about women much in the same way Trump does. A half-hearted apology for behavior so egregious that it sparked nearly 40 lawsuits by women is a bandaid on a bullet wound.”