The highest ranking members of the New York attorney general’s office are laughing, hugging, and taking selfies, gathered for a photo shoot at Cosmopolitan.com's headquarters. They are jittery and tired after the week they’ve had.

And what a week! At 6:47 p.m. on Monday, May 7, The New Yorker published an investigation into their boss, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, an outspoken feminist and proud adversary of President Donald Trump. In the story, four of his ex-girlfriends described routine stranglings and slaps, in addition to other physical and emotional abuses. At 7:21 p.m., Schneiderman released a statement saying the violence was part of consensual role-playing between himself and his sexual partners. At 9:45 p.m., he resigned.

The next day, Barbara Underwood was sworn in as his successor. She is the first female attorney general of New York. It was an inauspicious way to break a glass ceiling.



Barbara Underwood at Cosmopolitan.com HQ Tory Rust

"Everyone was stunned. I was stunned," Underwood says of the Schneiderman scandal. She is wearing the same blue suit from her historic swearing-in for today's photo shoot. "And now we're moving forward."

Underwood is the most qualified person to ever hold the role, her team tells me repeatedly. It's a phrase whose echo is bizarrely damning in a post-Hillary Clinton world. Nevertheless, it's true: Underwood spent the last decade serving as the state's solicitor general, and was acting solicitor general of the United States under George W. Bush. She argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court, and clerked under Justice Thurgood Marshall. She was the first in her class at Georgetown Law.

Lourdes Rosado and Margaret Garnett Tory Rust

Why did it take so long for a woman to take the helm, and in such a liberal state as New York? "I think it’s because the process is political," explains Janet Sabel, the chief deputy attorney general. "It's not a process based on who is, in truth, the best attorney out there in the community who can represent the interests of the state. Women have a tougher time competing in that political process. It’s telling that when we didn’t have a political process to decide who could lead, Barbara was the obvious choice."

Before Schneiderman in the AG role, there was Andrew Cuomo, the child of a political dynasty. Before Cuomo, it was Eliot Spitzer, who eventually resigned as New York’s governor when he was caught in a prostitution scandal in 2008.

Eric Schneiderman was an unabashed politician — many assumed he was gunning for a presidential run in 2020. "Where Washington D.C. has failed to lead on the issues that matter, Eric has made clear that New York will provide a road map for the rest of the country," read his biography on the attorney general website.

The 11 women gathered here represent the senior members of the attorney general's office, which employs 1,800 people across the state of New York. Schneiderman had assembled a team on which women held the majority of leadership positions; it was just one of the aspects of his prominent feminism. He repeatedly introduced a bill for free contraception in New York, defended access to abortion clinics, and published a brochure for victims of domestic violence.

He also, as The New Yorker pointed out, introduced a bill in 2010 to make strangulation a felony, noting that the act is a popular move for domestic abusers — a dazzling display of cognitive dissonance, according to his exes.

But the work was good, even if the man wasn't. "For me, it was reassuring when Barbara was announced as the acting AG — I knew that people would continue to think of all of us in a positive light because of the work we do and not because of this one blip," says Lourdes Rosado, the leader of the state's civil rights bureau. "All of a sudden it felt like, we know our course because she’s already our leader and she has such gravitas in the legal community."

ReNika Moore

Still, that blip looms large in the room as staffers extol the accomplishments of their new leader. Over the course of our interview, all 11 women are careful to refer to Schneiderman obliquely as "the previous leader" or to the scandal as "the events of the last few days."

Press secretary Amy Spitalnick compares the Schneiderman scandal to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. "A brilliant colleague said something to us on Tuesday: Our office has been through two traumatic events in the last couple of years. The second was obviously this week, but the first was the election," says Spitalnick, who also worked on the mayoral campaign of Anthony Weiner. "Many of us came to the office the morning after the election saying, 'Where do we go from here?' And immediately we put our heads down and got to work." It was the same, they say, last Tuesday.

"We focus on low-wage workers and we had workers coming in," says ReNika Moore, the chief of the labor bureau. "Somehow they hadn't heard about the events and they were like, 'I wasn’t paid. My family won’t eat.' These are the issues they’re concerned about.”

Manisha Sheth, Leslie Dubeck, Amy Spitalnick Tory Rust

Schneiderman was also leading the fight against Donald Trump and many of his policies. His office challenged the travel ban as soon as it was announced, as well as the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

"Trump has been Trump his entire life, and what is problematic is that he is the president," Moore asserts. "He's using the powers of government in ways that are abusive, that are discriminatory, that don’t value all of the people who make us this country. I think for us, as an office, it’s about recognizing when that’s happening, and going after it."

Christina Harvey and Jeanette Moy Tory Rust

The women vow that this work will continue. Natalia Salgado, the office's director of advocacy, has organized "resistance town halls" across New York to address citizens' concerns about the Trump administration. "Ultimately, what's beautiful about a movement is that it’s never dependent on one person," she says.

If one elephant in this room is Eric Schneiderman, the other is the fact that Underwood, their clearly beloved new leader, might only hold this job for a couple of weeks. She is the acting attorney general, and the New York state legislature is meeting with candidates this week to see if they'd like to appoint someone else. That person will then need to run for election in November 2018 — so it's possible that four people will run the office over the course of a year.

The job of attorney general in one of the nation's most liberal states under a controversial Republican president is, honestly, a sexy one. It's a potentially showy role where a person could earn constant headlines for taking on Trump policies and winning, as Schneiderman did. Within the first days of his scandal, over a dozen New York politicians and attorneys expressed interest in taking his post.

This leaves Underwood in the unfortunate position of having to battle people for the job she was just hired to do. "I respect the role the legislature has in this process, and I hope they will view it as an opportunity to do what is best for the office," she says. "I think, without any arrogance at all, it is fairly obvious that what is best for the office is some continuity."

New York’s Governor Cuomo agrees, and has discouraged the legislature and interested candidates from displacing Underwood. "She is extraordinarily qualified. I think she provides capable leadership and continuity in the office," he said last week.

Natalia Salgado

"Somebody once advised me in a different role: You’re in the job while you’re in the job, and you're in the job until you're not," Underwood says of guidance she received in 2001 from then-acting deputy attorney general Robert Mueller, who of course has become a household name in his own right since then.



"You just do it as well as you can for as long as you’re in the seat. And that's my plan," she says.

She has a badass team of women with her while she does it. And she’s careful about the context — when I ask the team how it feels to finally work under a woman, Underwood visibly cringes.

"Could we say working 'with'?" she asks. "It really bothers me when we talk about working 'under.'"

The room bursts out laughing.

Hair and makeup touch-ups by Glamsquad.