Indeed, one of the principal groups charged with overseeing and policing legislators’ behavior — the Joint Commission of Public Ethics, or Jcope — has been faulted in the past for lacking investigative muscle and proper funding. On Thursday, a spokesman for the commission, Walter McClure, said he could not comment on “anything that is or may be an investigative matter,” though he noted that the commission has issued investigations of sexual harassment in the past, including former Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak, who was found to have made sexual advances toward women who worked in his office. (That investigation’s findings, however, were issued almost two years after Mr. Gabryszak had resigned.)

On Thursday evening, Mr. Klein seemingly upped the ante, sending a letter to the acting chairman and executive director of the committee requesting that they open an investigation, saying again that the incident “did not happen, period,” and citing his lawyer’s own six-day investigation of “current and former staffers present at the time.”

Sexual misbehavior is hardly a new phenomenon in Albany, where lawmakers once bragged about the “Bear Mountain Compact,” an assertion that extramarital liaisons north of the Bear Mountain Bridge, a Hudson River crossing north of New York City, were not to be spoken about in home districts.

In 2012, the Democrat-dominated State Assembly was rocked by the unsavory acts of Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, a powerful Brooklyn Democrat, who had sexually harassed female staff members. As recently as November, a Republican assemblyman, Steven T. McLaughlin, was disciplined for sexual harassment, after an investigation found he had asked a female Assembly staff member for naked pictures of herself.

The Lopez episode led the Assembly to enact a series of reforms, including mandatory reporting of any complaint of sexual harassment and a ban on confidential settlements, proposals also being suggested by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other lawmakers this year.

The Klein scandal also threatened to overshadow the legislative session that began last week, and added intensity to the discussion of possible changes to internal policies and state laws meant to address sexual harassment. In a coincidence of timing, less than 24 hours after the news of Ms. Vladimer’s allegations broke, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to the governor — the two highest ranking women in state government — stood before an audience of hundreds of people in the New-York Historical Society’s auditorium in Manhattan to unveil Mr. Cuomo’s 2018 Women’s Agenda.

Both women heaped praise upon the plans, including the governor’s promise to crack down on sexual harassment in the workplace. But they made no mention of Ms. Vladimer or Mr. Klein, or of the existence of harassment in state government more broadly, even as they stressed women’s courage in coming forward and the importance of believing their stories.