Sexual Harassment Makes For Some Mighty Strange Cases

Some of the weirdest and most problematic cases of sexual harassment you'll ever see.

Sexual harassment - dictionary definitionI’ve handled and read enough sexual harassment cases to write a book — or more like a tome. From harassing comments, graffiti, and pics, all the way to outright aggravated assault — or worse. Much worse.

As I’ve written before, sexual harassment has less to do with sex than with power disparity and misogyny. And as I’ve also written, since the workplace is a microcosm of the world at large and sits on the fault lines of society’s major issues and volcanic changes, we can expect no end to these cases.

Over the long weekend I was thinking about some of the weirdest and most problematic cases of sexual harassment that I’ve encountered and thought that a good post (or more — many more) could be written about them.

So here goes.

Sex On The Ceiling?

This one has nothing to do with harassment but everything to do with sex in the workplace — or other places — and workers’ comp.

Workers’ Comp?

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There was an out-of-town business convention (in Australia) that was attended by a female employee. Her employer arranged her attendance and booked her lodging. It seems that (these things always happen that way) she met a local male friend, and, as the Australian Federal Court tried to delicately put it: “After dining together that evening they went to her motel room where they had sex. The respondent was injured whilst engaging in sexual intercourse when a glass light fitting above the bed was pulled from its mount and fell on her, causing injuries to her nose and mouth.”

What’s this? A glass light fitting “pulled from its mount”? How did that happen?

Ohhh, I get it – chandelier-swinging sex!

Bizarre enough, but the real bizarrity (??) is that the court held the employer liable for her injuries under the workers comp statute, because her injuries arose out of or in the course of her employment.

“Here the temporal relationship between the [employee’s] injuries and her employment is that they were suffered by her while she was at a particular place where her employer induced or encouraged her to be during an interval or interlude between an overall period or episode of work.”

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Oh, now I see. As long as the employer booked the room, anything goes! Good to know.

Do It A Few More Times Before It Is Harassment

A federal appeals court had a sexual harassment case a few years ago where the plaintiff was a female employee who worked part of the time in a trailer at a construction site. A male employee told her that “a large-breasted woman, whom he called ‘Double D,’” would attend a particular company event, and he asked her “whether the size of the woman’s breasts intimidated her.” He later spoke to her about tampons and “asked whether women ‘got off’ when they used a particular kind.” He also told her that “women were lucky because [they] got to have multiple orgasms.”

Additionally, he “would tell her that she had to clean the trailer while wearing a French maid’s costume (or maid’s uniform) or would make a similar comment to her.”

What did the court say about this outrageous harassing behavior? “Other than his references to the French maid’s costume, [he] reportedly made offensive sexual remarks to [her] on only about four occasions.” Only four?

Accordingly, the court held that there was no actionable sexual harassment “because the evidence will not support a finding that the offensive sexual conduct was so severe or pervasive that it altered the conditions of her employment and created a work environment that a reasonable person would consider hostile or abusive.”

Only in America!

Blame The Victim

But wait — it’s not only in America!

A while ago I came across an article in the Los Angeles Times by Carol Williams, in which she reported on Saudi Arabia, our new BFF. Seems that a survey by the King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue found that 80% of Saudis “blame the scourge of sexual harassment plaguing the country on the ‘deliberate flirtatious behaviour’ of women.”

Sounds about right to me in Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness we will not “lecture them” about their internal politics.

Is It Still The 50’s?

And in Kenya, it seems that it’s still the Mad Men 1950’s. In an article in SDE, Lydia Limbe wrote that “there exists a thin line between what some men consider traditional cues of seduction and sexual harassment.”

One woman reported on a colleague who was “easily confuse[d] for a monk who had just taken a day off from a monastery … [who one day] grabbed me, rubbed himself against me, making funny grunting noises. I pushed him away with all my might.”

Another woman told of a male co-worker who wanted to engage in “gland to gland” combat.

“Gland to gland” combat?

Is There Sexual Harassment In The Afterlife?

Back to the good ol’ USA for this last one.

Back in 2013, Meera Jagannathan, a contributing writer at upstate New York’s Post-Standard, reported on a settlement of a sexual harassment case arising out of … a funeral home.

It was alleged that a licensed funeral director who was the president of a mortuary school in Syracuse touched a female student’s thigh, kissed, hugged and touched female students, and asked a student if she was a virgin, and when she said yes, he told her, “What a waste of life.”

“What a waste of life” – from a funeral director!

Is that all he did?

Nope. He also simulated sex on a body in the embalming room.

The school reportedly closed.

Takeaway

Life is, of course, stranger than fiction.

And there’s much more to come!


richard-b-cohenRichard B. Cohen has litigated and arbitrated complex business and employment disputes for almost 40 years, and is a partner in the NYC office of the national “cloud” law firm FisherBroyles. He is the creator and author of his firm’s Employment Discrimination blog, and received an award from the American Bar Association for his blog posts. You can reach him at Richard.Cohen@fisherbroyles.com and follow him on Twitter at @richard09535496.