N.Y. Nominee Faces Charge of Harassment

In a case mixing echoes of Anita Faye Hill with early mayoral election maneuvering, a man who was to be a top deputy to New York City’s Mayor David N. Dinkins stepped aside Monday amid a furor over charges of sexual harassment.

Dinkins reluctantly announced that Randy Daniels, a former CBS television news correspondent, had withdrawn from the deputy mayor’s post he was set to assume next month after a woman who worked for him in 1987 charged he made uninvited advances at the time and had threatened her employment if she did not have sex with him.

Acknowledging that Daniels contended he has been falsely accused and that he has no reason to disbelieve him, the mayor nevertheless told a City Hall news conference the unsubstantiated sexual harassment charges were “very, very serious ones” that threatened Daniels’ ability to perform his job as New York’s deputy mayor for public and community affairs.

A lawyer for Daniels, 41, said that he had filed a $21-million libel and slander suit against his accuser, Barbara Wood, his assistant when they were both on the staff of City Council President Andrew J. Stein. Wood’s uncle, Bob Teague, a former New York television reporter, also was named as a defendant. Daniels served as Stein’s press secretary.

Daniels accused Stein of leaking the charges, and Dinkins--who has been at the center of a firestorm over the appointment--attacked Stein for not investigating the allegations earlier.

The mayor called on Wood and anyone else to come forward with any substantiation, and challenged Stein to explain what if any action he took when the accusations were first raised in his office years ago.