Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and suing, because they fear retaliation if they have to complain in-house,” Vicki Schultz, professor at Yale Law School and one of the authors of that statement, told TIME in an email. The internal complaint process, however, “deters many victims of harassment from ever reporting to the U.S. Since 1991, juries have returned well over 500 verdicts on sexual harassment - decisions that often contradict one another and send mixed signals about how we should behave anytime we meet a co-worker we’d like to see after five. Today it’s embedded in multiple Supreme Court decisions (three more are expected before July), thousands of corporate policies and a host of lower-court cases that have spread like kudzu across the legal landscape. Just 25 years ago, sexual harassment was considered a radical-fringe by-product of feminist theory. Part of the reason these workplace sexual harassment cases at this time were so thorny was that many people, including experts, disagreed on the definitions of terms such as “quid pro quo harassment” and “hostile work environment.” As TIME reported in the run-up to Jones’ case, the laws on the subject were anything but clear:īut in truth the tangle of laws currently defining sexual harassment is so jumbled that even if everyone could agree on the facts, it’s simply impossible to predict the outcome of a case like Jones v. (Paula Jones’ lawyers cited the earlier Burlington Industries ruling prominently, TIME noted back then.) The case facing the Supreme Court was the result of the company’s appeal on that idea. Though she ended up getting promoted without sleeping with him, a lower court held that what she experienced was quid pro quo harassment anyway, even if the retribution never actually materialized. In Burlington Industries, Kimberly Ellerth claimed that a vice president at her company commented on her physical appearance and told her that he could make her job “very hard or very easy” at the company, which Ellerth understood to mean that her success at work was contingent on sleeping with him. Though a lower-court judge had ruled that they had been harassed, that earlier ruling also held that the city couldn’t be held responsible for the harassment, as City Hall didn’t know what was happening. In Faragher, Beth Ann Faragher said that while working as a municipal lifeguard in a town north of Miami in the late 1980s, male supervisors groped her and other female lifeguards, pantomimed oral sex, invited women to shower with them and entered their locker room without knocking.
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