The #MeToo Movement Came to Albany. But Will It Stick?

ALBANY, N.Y. — In the months since the #MeToo movement arrived at the state capital, the moral reckoning that upended the nation has entangled officials ranging from agency leaders to a powerful state senator to the attorney general. There have been speeches and protests, open letters and new laws.

And the repercussions have been severe: On Wednesday, Jay Kiyonaga, the executive deputy commissioner of the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, was fired for sexual harassment. Last month, Eric T. Schneiderman resigned from his post as the state attorney general after being accused by four women of physical abuse.

But as the legislative session winds to a close, some lawmakers, activists and victims say Albany’s expiation has been uneven, sparing some bad actors even as it has felled others. Some worry about a focus on appearances over substance. And attempts at reform have been shackled by the political calculations that accompany any attempt to enact change in New York’s famously Byzantine Capitol.

“I don’t know that it means wide-scale change,” Patricia Gunning, a former state prosecutor who had accused Kiyonaga of harassment, said of his firing. She said the outcome of her complaint was likely the result of a combination of media pressure and “political optics.”

“Broad, systemic change takes time,” she said. “What I hope comes from this is that we begin to take steps toward building supports for women and making it actually safe to come forward.”

For Gunning, Kiyonaga’s ouster was the long-overdue outcome of a yearslong fight.

After officials at the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs, where Gunning had worked under Kiyonaga, declared her complaints without merit, she brought her case directly to the governor’s office. The governor’s counsel, Alphonso David, referred her complaint to the state inspector general, who on Wednesday issued a blistering report calling Kiyonaga’s behavior “reprehensible and indefensible.”

But Gunning, who resigned from the Justice Center last August and had filed a federal discrimination complaint just days earlier, said she had spoken to other women who still felt afraid to come forward, even after the news of Kiyonaga’s dismissal.

“I think what we have learned is how varied the mechanisms are in state government and how inconsistent they are,” she said.

Indeed, others who have been accused of sexual harassment have emerged largely unscathed.

Three months after state Sen. Jeffrey D. Klein, then the leader of an influential group of Democrats who collaborated with the Republicans, was accused of forcibly kissing a former staffer, Klein announced that he would rejoin the mainline Democrats. In return, he was made the deputy leader of their conference. On May 25, Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the conference’s leader and an outspoken proponent of women’s rights, endorsed him for re-election.

For Erica Vladimer, the former staffer who had accused Klein, the endorsement was more evidence of the impossibility of change amid Albany’s political webs.

“If female elected officials won’t stand up for victims, who will?” Vladimer wrote on Twitter after the endorsement. “Politics should never get in the way of representing the 10 million women of New York. This is why victims don’t come forward.”

Asked about the accusations against Klein, Stewart-Cousins has said she would wait for the outcome of an investigation by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics. But it remains unclear whether that investigation has been opened at all: The commission is required to notify respondents within 45 days of receiving a complaint whether it has decided to begin a formal investigation, but a spokeswoman and lawyer for Klein, as well as a spokesman for the commission, have all declined to comment on whether any such notification had been given.

Even some officials who were disciplined have been raised as examples of the incomplete nature of Albany’s purported self-purification. After several women accused Brian J. Gestring, a top official at the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, of creating an environment rife with harassment, the criminal justice agency declined to punish him, calling the allegations unsubstantiated. The agency did later fire him — but not, it said, because of the harassment accusations.

“There’s been a lot of noise and a lot of posturing, and there have been some people that have been terminated,” John W. Bailey, a lawyer for two of the women who testified against Gestring, said. “But the victims are still victims. There’s absolutely been nothing done to right the wrong as to them.”

And after a flurry of legislative activity during the state’s budget negotiations to pass a package of sexual harassment reforms, the conversation among lawmakers appears to have quieted, amid an 11th-hour impasse in the state Senate and numerous outstanding bills on issues from gun control to teacher evaluations to reproductive rights.

“There’s not nearly enough response about what should be happening,” said Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan and a frequent critic of the state’s sexual harassment policies. She added, “I think that women legislators are very aware that we did not get done what we need to get done.” Krueger acknowledged that in the behemoth of New York’s state government, important issues often fell unintentionally by the wayside.

“I’m not sure that the lack of conversation nowadays translates into people thinking that we’ve done what we need to do,” she said, calling sexual harassment reform one of many issues “that you hope can happen, and you work to try to have happen.”

For Vladimer, who is part of a working group of women devoted to pressing for further reform, that is not enough.

“If the Legislature wants to hang up their ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign on their small improvements and move forward,” she said, “we’re going to continue those conversations.”

The topic of sexual harassment is likely to be a campaign issue throughout the summer and fall, as the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon has made it a frequent attack point in her Democratic primary campaign against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

But Amy Paulin, an assemblywoman from Westchester who drafted and circulated an open letter decrying workplace sexual harassment, said it would be impossible to know the true extent of the appetite for change until the legislation session resumed next year.

“Everyone’s on their best behavior,” Paulin said. “The concern I always have is, does it stick?”