A close friend of Jared Kushner was slapped with state harassment charges Wednesday — nearly eight months after he scored a last-minute pardon from President Donald Trump wiping away federal charges for the same alleged cyberstalking campaign.
Ken Kurson, 52, the former editor-in-chief of the New York Observer, was charged last year in Brooklyn federal court with stalking and harassing three victims he blamed for his 2015 divorce.
The felony eavesdropping and harassment charges filed by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance revolve around the same alleged conduct. Kurson arrived in Manhattan Supreme Court in handcuffs, wearing beige slacks and a blue gingham shirt.
“We will not accept presidential pardons as get-out-of-jail-free cards for the well-connected in New York,” Vance said in a release. “As alleged in the complaint, Mr. Kurson launched a campaign of cybercrime, manipulation, and abuse from his perch at the New York Observer, and now the people of New York will hold him accountable.”
Kurson allegedly wrote negative online reviews of some of his victims using aliases and visited their places of work. He also took photographs of two of his victims’ workplaces and inquired about one’s work schedule, creeping out co-workers, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors began investigating Kurson in 2018 after Trump nominated him to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The appointment came with a background check that reportedly alarmed authorities.
In his final hours in office, Trump pardoned Kurson while the federal case was still pending.
The White House said the probe began only because of the nomination to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The White House added that Kurson’s former wife had expressed “disgust” with his arrest.
Kushner, who owned the Observer, hired Kurson to run the paper in 2013.
Kushner transferred ownership of the Observer to a family trust when he became a top White House adviser in the Trump administration. Kurson left the paper in 2017.
