Of course there would be any number of witnesses to a relationship. But there wouldn’t be any number of witnesses who could testify that it was of a harassing nature. That could very easily rest on just the word of the accuser alone.
I don’t know. All I said was to keep an eye on this case. What makes it different than many other cases are 1) the fact that it’s only one accuser, 2) the nature of the accused’s denials, and 3) that the accuser came forth with a lawyer who has already sued other media entities.
So I suspect it may have been a bad breakup, someone looking to cash on the current atmosphere, and a jittery employer. But I don’t know. He’s a public figure, so possibly more will come out.
What I said first is quite simply that your case doesn’t fit the criteria in the OP, and I stand by it. This isn’t an allegation made by one subordinate with no witnesses or collaborators, as the accused admits to a sexual relationship with the accuser. It’s not actually clear from the article (and others) that she was actually a subordinate or co-worker, though I think it’s a reasonable assumption. The article also doesn’t allege that something of a “harassing nature” occurred per se, but instead uses the phrase “improper sexual conduct” which could include something as straightforward as a policy of ‘you can’t bang your subordinates here, period’, so it’s possible that his admission is an admission of exactly what he’s accused of (although I doubt it’s that simple). So this completely fails on at least one criteria of the OP, and possibly multiple.
And in a more general sense, this simply isn’t a case where a manager is just doing his job and gets fired because of a single accuser, where refusing to hold closed-door meetings would help. This is a case where the accused was having sex with someone, not just work-related meetings, and “don’t actually have sex with your subordinates while you’re still in that work relationships” is actually a pretty standard way to avoid harassment (and other conduct) issues.
If so, then the criteria in your OP were unreasonably narrow.
If a guy is accused of an improper relationship and the witnesses can only testify that there was a relationship, it’s like if a guy was accused of spousal abuse and the witnesses can only testify that the couple was married.
Well yes. But the implications are the same.
The question is whether it’s true that an accusation from a single person can ruin the accused. If that’s the case here, then it would be the case elsewhere. In this particular case, closed-door meetings wouldn’t have helped, but if it’s true that an accusation from a single person can ruin someone, then you can’t dismiss it as you might if that were not the case.
In sum, the question here is how much evidence is required before someone suffers severe consequences. Anything that fits that criteria is relevant.
No, my criteria are broad enough for what I want to discuss. Telling me that it’s unreasonable for me to discuss one topic and not some other topic is the thing that is actually unreasonable.
No, they’re not, and I’ve already explained why. Issues arriving from sexual intercourse with someone, possibly a co-worker or subordinate, are simply not the same thing as issues arising from normal business discourse with a subordinate.
Posted in the OP, by me, and you don’t get to tell me what my own question was. I provided ample context and some specific criteria in the OP, and what you’re posting simply doesn’t fit them, or shed light on the issue that I was discussing. Telling me that I said something different than what I said is not reasonable.
You can discuss whatever you want to discuss. But if you’re trying to draw broad conclusions and then set the criteria of acceptable evidence too narrowly, then you’re being unreasonable in claiming that the dearth of evidence makes your case.
For purposes of what level of evidence is sufficient to harm someone, the only thing that counts is what level of evidence there is for the specific conduct that the accused is accused of.
I’m trying to draw broad conclusions about the risks to people who engage in professional relationships with co-workers. I have no interest in discussing the risks involved for people who are banging their co-workers, especially subordinates, because that’s an unusual, high-risk activity that runs directly counter to the original discussion that prompted the thread. Seriously, this started off with people who don’t do anything improper but feel that they should always bring in a witness if they’re going to have a one-on-one meeting with a subordinate to mitigate risk, and you’re using an example of someone who sticks his dick in subordinates to show that there is a risk.
It’s like if we’re discussing whether side view cameras would reduce your risks in ordinary driving, and you dragged in a story about a drunk driver getting injured. The extreme riskiness of the drunk driving behavior swamps anything about the potential protection of side view cameras, plus we already have a foolproof plan to keep from getting into a wreck as a drunk driver (don’t drive drunk in the first place).
Nope, no one declared you God of Forum Discussions, so you don’t get to arbitrarily declare The Truth. The additional risk factors undertaken by the person are hugely relevant in a discussion about harmful evidence. As I said in my OP, an example of someone who’s guilty of other firing offenses like showing up to work drunk would not be a good example, because it’s highly likely that the person was actually fired for the drinking PLUS the accusation, not simply for the accusation. Your example of someone who bangs co-workers is similar, because the act of banging co-workers is itself a hugely risky activity that most companies discourage or prohibit, and you can’t show that the firing was solely because of the accusation, and not because of both the accusation AND the related bad behavior the he already confessed to.
OK, so it sounds like what you’re saying now boils down to something slightly different. Specifically, you’re suggesting that the guy was not sacked because the allegations from that one person were found to be credible, but because his even having a consensual relationship with her violated some company policy and was considered inappropriate, and contributed to his firing. That’s not what you said originally, but fine.
If you want to hang your hat on that, OK. I think that’s rather dubious.
Are you okay with people dying in airplane crashes?
Are you okay with people dying of heart attacks?
I’d sure hope not, but I find it had to believe you want cars banned, planes grounded, or hamburgers illegal, though it is very, very obvious that cars, planes and hamburgers do in fact kill people through traffic accidents, plane crashes, and heart attacks. There’s no doubt you could reduce traffic mishaps by making everyone take the bus, but you and I and all people with brains know there’s a tradeoff there in terms of freedom, economic benefits, and the value of a pluralistic society that makes the risk worth it.
Ar you okay with people going to prison for robberies they did not commit? It’s happened, you know; it’ll happen again. So should we stop enforcing the laws against robbery? Kind of a stupid idea, isn’t it?
Having a society were women are heard when they say men abuse them is worth the tradeoff of the extremely rare occasions when someone will be falsely accused AND the accusation isn’t shot to pieces.
You seem to think I’m limited to picking one reason to disqualify an example, but I’m not and I’m saying that this is flawed in multiple ways. First off, it fails at the most basic level because it’s not based on the allegations of one accuser, as the accused admitted to at least part of the allegations, meaning there’s more than one witness. It might fail in several other ways, as there are no real details - it might not be a sexual harassment case at all since the complaint literally says ‘inappropriate sexual behavior’ and nothing else, the accuser might not be a co-worker or subordinate, and the behavior might not have even occurred at work. There also could be more witnesses or recordings of behavior, since we really have no details at all.
Finally, the guy admits that he’s banging the accuser, and presuming the accuser is someone he works with that is an extremely high-risk behavior that is often an explicit firing offense and in practice is commonly ‘if we have to hear about it, it’s a firing offense’. So it’s doesn’t qualify both because the guy is engaging in egregiously bad behavior and because it’s almost completely contrary to what sparked the original discussion. (BTW, if the accuser isn’t someone he works with, then the example fails to qualify as they’re not co-workers).
That was an FBI study which he relied on a sudy which found that an average of 8% of rape allegations were unfounded. This is often bandied out sans context, but it was using FBI’s standard defination of unfounded, which means made knowingly it was untrue. Whats often left out is that rape had by far the highest rate of deliberatley false allegations, everything else was less than 1%. The actual rate of cases which were dismissed is highter, about 40%./QUOTE]
Cite? You’re bandying things about without context and without cites. Where are you getting this claim that rape had the highest rate of deliberately false allegations? Or this stat that “everything else” (false reports of all other crimes, I assume) was only at 1%?
As for your claim that the actual rate of rape cases which were dismissed is “higher, about 40%”, you need to cite that, too. Perhaps you’re confusing it with the oft-cited 1994 study by Prof. Eugene Kanin, reported that 41% of the 109 sexual assault reports made to one midwestern police agency were deemed to be false over a nine-year time period. However, the determination that the charges were false was made solely by the detectives; this evaluation was not reviewed substantively by the researcher or anyone else." Or maybe you were referring to the 2006 Rumney study that includes “a study by Jordan (2004) that reports a false allegation rate of 38%. However, that figure is actually the percentage of false reports among cases that had been classified as unfounded. Since the researcher does not provide the total number of cases of rape in her sample, it is impossible to determine the actual rate of false allegations.”
Only a complete nimrod would say and/or believe something like this. This is akin to saying that it’s OK if the occasional innocent person goes to jail once in a while, as long as most people in jail were guilty. In actuality, it’s NEVER alright if someone innocent is EVER unjustly accused of anything.
Obviously, you would be singing a different tune if you were the one being falsely accused.