New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax returns he released on Monday show he sold the rights to his COVID memoir for over $5 million.
$5 million for a book that only sold around 50,000 copies.
American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic came out in mid-October with the virus still going strong in the state.
Crown Publishing gave Cuomo the contract despite investigations into his nursing home mandate at the beginning of the pandemic.
Then we learned Cuomo’s aides kept fudging the nursing home death numbers while he wrote this masterpiece.
The publisher paid Cuomo $3.12 million in 2020. It will give him “an additional $2 million” in the next few years:
Cuomo’s financial records indicate that after taxes and expenses, his net gain from that initial payment of $3.12 million was $1.54 million. He has since donated $500,000 to the United Way of New York State to help with pandemic “recovery and vaccination efforts.”
The remaining $1 million and change has been placed in a trust for his three daughters. They gave him “the strength and love to make it through the crisis every day,” Cuomo adviser Rich Azzopardi said in a statement.
Crown Publishing announced in March it would stop promoting Cuomo’s book due to the scandals:
Sales of the book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic,” had already slowed severely as the governor found himself embroiled in overlapping crises of his own making, including a drumbeat of accusations about his inappropriate behavior toward younger women and his aides’ manipulation of nursing home data.
Gillian Blake of Crown Publishing Group said in response to an email from The New York Times that there were “no plans” to reprint Mr. Cuomo’s book or to reissue it in paperback, citing “the ongoing investigation into N.Y.S. reporting of Covid-related fatalities in nursing homes.”