Cuomo ‘avoided marrying longtime girlfriend Sandra Lee by claiming Catholics can’t wed after divorce’
GOVERNOR Andrew Cuomo reportedly avoided tying the knot with longtime girlfriend chef Sandra Lee by saying he did not feel he could remarry as a divorced Roman Catholic.
The New York governor would tell that story to anyone who asked why he did not marry Lee though they were together for more than a decade, a close friend told The Daily Mail on Monday.
As she waited for Cuomo to propose, Lee apparently had a picture of the engagement ring she wanted.
“It was a huge cushion-cut ring from Bergdorf Goodman,” the ex-former friend said.
“It was the size of a thumbnail and, as you can imagine, very expensive.”
The friend said they were having dinner in fall 2014 just before Cuomo won his second term in office, when Lee showed her a page from a high-end magazine with the ring of her choice.
“But she wanted it changed,” the friend said.
“I can’t remember whether it was an emerald in the picture and she wanted a sapphire or if it was the other way round, but she wanted it custom made.”
The former friend also claimed that Lee “really wanted to be First Lady of New York.”
“I always felt she was jealous of Andrew’s close relationship with his mother Matilda – who of course had been First Lady when Mario Cuomo was Governor,” the friend said.
Lee, 54, denied to The Daily Mail that Cuomo used his Roman Catholic faith as an excuse not to propose, and said she did not carry the picture of the ring.
Cuomo, 63, divorced Kerry Kennedy in 2005, two years after he found out she was having an affair with polo player Bruce Colley, a close friend of his.
The pair were married for 15 years and had three daughters together.
In fall 2005, Cuomo met Lee, who was recently divorced, at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.
Lee moved from California to New York in 2006 as their relationship went public.
However, Cuomo waited six years until he moved to Lee’s home in Mt Kisco, which is 40 miles north of Manhattan.
It wasn’t until three years later that Lee apparently talked about the engagement ring of her dreams.
Most read in News
Five years after that, Cuomo and Lee ended their relationship.
In a joint statement, they said: “Over the recent past, we have realized that our lives have gone in different directions and our romantic relationship has turned into a deep friendship.”
Five women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, the two most recent being former policy and operations aide Ana Liss and former aide Karen Hinton.