On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Pollak, Melissa F. <[email protected]> wrote: > It took about 40 minutes of searching last night, but I actually found what > I was looking for -- and I did have a few facts wrong, e.g., > > 1. It was a District Court, not the Supreme Court. After Catherine won in > the District Court, the agency decided to settle with her. (The case > received a huge amount of publicity (locally) at the time, but it's been > about 20 years, so it's not surprising my memory is faulty.) Since then, the > case law has expanded greatly. > > 2. I had the wrong federal agency. Here is one of the write-ups (from the > AP) I found: > > http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1345&dat=19880517&id=2ccSAAAAIBAJ&; > sjid=3vkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6785,188069 > > BTW, there was coverage this morning on The Today Show. Apparently, Nell > appeared on Nancy Grace's show and a part of the interview was shown.
Thanks Melissa, that helps a lot. It does make a big difference that it was not a Supreme Court case - that was what was puzzling me. Now that I read the story, I do remember it, and I agree that it was an important case. I found it a little difficult to read the story that you link to, but there are a number of other stories on the web as well. See, for example: http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-17/news/vw-5548_1_sexual-harassment >From what I can tell, this case was basically decided by a Federal Judge in June of 1988 (the SEC settled on the penalty). I believe by this time Meritor had already been decided by the Supreme Court (1986) - though when Catherine Broderick first filed her suit, Meritor had not been decided, so the case could be described as ground-breaking. I have pasted relevant portions from the LA iImes below (actually, it looks like they are re-printing a Washington Post story). With respect Melissa, I don't think the details of this story support the claims you made at all. You wrote: "What's relevant to this discussion is that she herself was never harassed, nor was her job/career (she was an attorney) threatened or even affected. She just didn't think she should have to work in a place where "everyone" was sleeping with each other and trading sex stories and favoritism occurred as a result of it. The Supreme Court agreed with her." But most of this is not true. Broderick was harassed herself, her career was threatened, and very directly and negatively affected. It was not just that she did not want to work in an office where lots of people were sleeping with each other (and it is quite clear that if this was her claim she would not have won her case). She did make a claim about favoritism - but the favoritism she had standing to complain about directly affected her work situation, and was not simply a claim that other employees were given promotions that had not direct affect on her career. And of course, the Supreme Court did not agree with her. As you say, memory for specific details often fades and rearranges, and this was more than 20 years ago. I am certainly not at all suggesting that you have intentionally or negligently misrepresented this particular case. But the confabulations here are directly relevant to what I believe are misunderstandings you have about what constitutes Sexual Harassment. Now the law is organic, and it is possible that at some time in the future, simple sexual favoritism may constitute illegal sexual harassment, but that is not currently true. The discrepancies between what happened to Catherine Broderick and what Nell Scovell claims happened to her are both significant and instructive. 1. Broderick did experience sexual advances from her supervisor. 2. Broderick was subject to negative work conditions (denied promotion, given very poor job evaluations, subject to abusive verbal and non-verbal punishment in the workplace, etc.). 3. Broderick was punished for complaining about this harassing treatment (indeed, my memory is that this is one of the lasting legacies from this case - no Human Resource Manager today would allow retaliation against an employee who has reported harassment like this - once that happens a company is dead in the water). 4. A judge found that her workplace was "permeated by sexual harassment and discrimination". By Scovell's own report, she did not experience sexual advances from her supervisor, did not have negative job consequences and never suffered retaliation (of course, she never reported or complained of any harassing treatment at the time). And of course, as of this point, no independent reviewer, much less a sitting judge, has issued a finding that there was a level of harassment that would have been experienced as discriminating by any reasonable woman (which is the standard set by the Supreme Court). This is what some of us mean when we keep saying that just because this one woman (Scovell) reports that she thought the environment was hostile does not mean that it meets the legal definition of a hostile work environment. It is also simply not true that just because people who work in the office have sex with supervisors (presumably at home or in private) that the work environment is inevitably, or even likely, to be hostile. In the Broderick case there were more than rumors of sexual behavior, it was more than common knowledge. The sexual relationships were talked about openly in the office, and occurred at times in the work space. Now, perhaps this was true at Letterman's Late Night, but nothing in Scovell's Vanity Fair article makes that claim. I also saw the piece on the Today Show this morning (I think Scoville was actually on the Joy Behar program, not Nancy Grace, which in my book is an important distinction). There was nothing in the clip Today showed that was different from what was in the article. But they did have a female attorney on (I can't remember her name, I think she is a well known former prosecutor in NY), who made the exact same point I have been making here: There are two kinds of Sexual Harassment, Quid Pro Quo and Hostile Work Environment, and neither of them apply to the facts as reported by Scovell. She did suggest that perhaps the recent attention will be a spur to legislatures adding a third category - sexual favoritism, and she seemed positively disposed towards that. I think that is much more complicated than it sounds. Sexual Harassment is a sub section of Job Discrimination. Sexual favoritism would have to be seen in a larger context of other kinds of favoritism (e.g. what if a Jewish employee felt that a Christian subordinate who goes to the same church as a boss was getting undeserved favorable treatment?). ****************************** "The (Washington regional office) managers created their own little world," Broderick says now. "They wanted to be big fish in their own little ponds. Each one had to have his own girlfriend or mistress in the office, as if it was a competition. They expected you to come in and drop your integrity at the door . . . . They thought I was going to go away. I wasn't going away. he sometimes doubted her own abilities as she suffered the humiliation of low performance evaluations after she complained. She was denied promotions, told she was a "festering morale problem" and threatened with firing. When she fought back in court, she was faced with a system that provided free legal counsel for the SEC attorneys she complained about, while she had to sell some of her favorite possessions to pay her own legal bills. She applied for more than 100 jobs within the SEC and outside the agency. But in the good-old-boy network of the securities bar, she has been blackballed, she says. At times since she first complained of her managers' affairs, she felt so low that she thought of committing suicide. "They wanted to see me cry," she says, sitting in her Arlington town house. "I cried a lot, but I never backed down." U.S. District Judge John H. Pratt, after finding on May 13 that the SEC's Washington regional office was a work environment permeated by sexual harassment and discrimination and that SEC managers had retaliated against her when she complained, handed down a landmark order Thursday." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
