Cyrus Vance Jr. during the inaugural National Prosecutorial Summit, October 21, 2014.
For most of his eight years as Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr. has kept a low enough profile that politicos pause a second at the mention of his name, remembering that he isn’t his father, the Washington wise man who served as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. Junior’s biggest initiative has been effective but characteristically wonkish: applying data analysis to crime-fighting.
Cy Jr.’s name recognition certainly has skyrocketed in the past two weeks. He’s under fire as never before, accused of bad judgment and dubious ethics. First came news that he’d dropped a 2012 criminal investigation of Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. over their misleading statements to prospective condo buyers—after a conversation with Trump family lawyer Marc Kasowitz, one of the largest donors to Vance’s political campaigns (Vance has said that Kasowitz and the contributions “had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case”). Then The New Yorker, as part of a devastating story by Ronan Farrow, released two minutes of audio, recorded in 2015 by the New York Police Department, in which Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, now accused by more than two dozen women of sexual harassment and assault, essentially admits to groping a 22-year-old Filipina-Italian model and actress, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez.
A spokeswoman for Vance said the Strauss-Kahn episode did not affect the office’s subsequent pursuit of sexual-assault cases “in the slightest,” and pointed to other high-profile defendants who have been successfully prosecuted, for similar offenses, by the district attorney. Yet with Weinstein’s piggishness finally exposed, Vance is enduring the harshest glare of his low-key tenure, with his competence and ethics questioned. Not that he’s in danger of losing his job anytime soon: he ran unopposed in New York’s Democratic primary in September, and next month, in the general election, Cyrus Vance Jr. will face only a long-shot write-in opponent.