Melissa DeRosa’s Revenge Campaign

Rebecca Traister reviews What’s Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics & Crisis by Melissa DeRosa.

“As its subtitle promises, What’s Left Unsaid prizes DeRosa’s position at the heart of power, laying bare her enthusiasm for domination and retribution — exactly the qualities that paved the way for both Cuomo’s rise and his ouster. If you want to know how power works — how it’s won, how it’s used, how it’s lost — the answers are here, not only between the lines but in the book’s very existence, which is part of a quiet, ceaseless campaign to discredit and bully Cuomo’s enemies, starting with the women who came forward, spoke up, and brought him down.”

“What’s Left Unsaid is, in some ways, an incredibly sad book. DeRosa is certainly a victim of this punitive, unrelenting power structure almost as much as she is an upholder of it. Among other things, by her account, it cost her her marriage, her reputation, and enormous amounts of goodwill. But what the book makes clear is that even as that system has collapsed, and taken her with it, DeRosa’s most fervent wish has remained to see it rise again with Cuomo at its top and her by his side.”