Is this just bald assertion or do you have any evidence of a case remotely like this happening? Everything I’ve read on sexual harassment or heard from friends who have dealt with it disagrees with the myth that one allegation by a subordinate is going to get an innocent manger fired on the spot. It’s easy to say ‘oh, but now any allegation will be automatically believed’, but there’s no evidence supporting it, and a lot of history saying that things just don’t work that way.
This thread really sounds like someone working hard to turn themselves into a victim.
I doubt it will be. We saw a change with Anita Hill, but it really just brought an issue out of the closet and forced companies to address it. But the behavior really hasn’t changed that much (I was a sexual harassment victim in 1986 or thereabouts, and still see it happening).
Its like Sandy Hook and guns. It should have been a turning point, but our attention span, and our ability to ignore what is uncomfortable so we can keep doing what we want, keeps change from happening.
In the end, Weinstein is going to come down to “what a surprise! A casting couch! Shocker.” We will blame the mostly young, good looking women trying to break into a notorious industry for wanting to be in that industry. And the fact that women at Uber (and tons of other tech companies - and tons of non tech companies) were regularly sexually harassed and driven from their jobs will be forgotten.
In both the cases you cited, there were multiple women who claimed they had been harassed. The first wasn’t fired: he killed himself before the investigation was complete. The second is being suspended while the situation is investigated.
I know. I am not at all defending the men in either case. In both cases the women are believed (as they should be), but the men faced discipline (losing a job (the first guy was “sacked”) or being put under ‘administrative leave’) “while the situation is being investigated” as you say.
I was just responding to Pantastic’s assertion that “there’s no evidence supporting it, and a lot of history saying that things just don’t work that way.” I think things work exactly that way. Especially in today’s climate.
I don’t really know what the right answer is - I suppose you should not leave a harasser at his job while things are being checked-out, but on the other hand should you really take disciplinary action before the facts are in? I dunno.
If a 20yo who’s not a walking fart says she got groped, people may believe her or not.
If a 50yo says she got groped, the most likely and still somewhat civilized response after “yeah right” is “hey, at your age, consider it a compliment”.
And if a man says he was sexually assaulted… if the assaulters were male, the one who was assaulted gets called from wimp on up, and if they were female the reaction is “oh man, you got lucky, har de har har!”
My bet is the sweet spot for being believed is actually between those two. A twenty year old is probably more likely to be expected to suck it up - she might be believed, but harassing a young woman is something our society finds “normal” - she isn’t something we expect to respect, so its excused. She’s told “life isn’t fair” and also gets the “what did you expect, you are an attractive girl, you should be flattered” (I was about 22 when I was severely harassed, and my daughter is an attractive eighteen). A young woman’s sexuality belongs to the public, and as such, her boss can treat her like a piece of meat, as long as he doesn’t go too far.
Somewhere in a woman’s late 20s to mid-30s she starts getting treated less like an object and more like a person by society, and therefore, societies expectations on how she should be treated shift. Now treating her like an object isn’t societally acceptable, so you might get punished for treating her as such.
But then she starts the decent into maturity - and mature women are invisible. We should be grateful when someone notices our sexuality - even it its by harassing us.
But you responded to my assertion by providing articles that support it - neither of your examples show the thing that I said was a myth actually happening, and instead confirm that when people get in trouble for sexual harassment there are multiple witnesses to the behavior. To support your assertion that things work exactly like “one allegation by a subordinate is going to get an innocent manager fired on the spot”, you would need to show a case where only one subordinate came forward and the manager was fired/forced to resign in a way that appears to be a direct consequence of it. You have failed to do that, instead you have show two situations where men in a position of authority got in trouble because of accusations from multiple sources.
Here are direct quotes just to make it clear:
From the article:
Your first is a situation where it took at least three subordinates making allegations for something to be done. Clearly this supports (and certainly doesn’t contradict) my contention that a single subordinate making allegations with no supporting evidence is not enough to get someone fired, as it took three, not one. From the tone of the article, there’s likely more evidence that simple testimony than the three and that it wasn’t simple a single event.
Again, you’ve failed to provide an example of a single subordinate making accusations, it’s once again three people, two of whom cited his behavior as the reason for leaving the office. And he’s not actually being fired immediately, but put on (presumably paid) administrative leave while the allegations are investigated.
OK, so those examples were for more than one accuser. How about these, selected form this recent article that lists multiple and singular accusers (I am only posting the singular ones):
*Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, has been accused of sexual harassment by producer Isa Dick Hackett, according to the New York Times. He has since resigned.
Lockhart Steele, the creator of popular websites such as Curbed and Racked, has been accused of sexual harassment by a former Vox employee, according to Variety. Vox has since fired Steele.
Andrew Kramer, the Lionsgate executive, has been accused of sexual harassment by a former assistant, according to Vulture. He has since been dropped.
Twiggy Ramirez a/k/a Jeordie White, the bassist from Marilyn Manson has been accused of rape, according to Variety. He has since been fired from the band.
Tyler Grasham, the Hollywood agent, has been accused of sexual assault and sodomy by actor Tyler Cornell, who has also filed a police report, according to Variety. Grasham has since been fired by his agency, ACA.
Adam Venit, an agent at WME, has been cited as the unnamed person Terry Crews referred to in a viral series of tweets about being groped by “a high-level Hollywood executive,” according to Variety. Venit has since taken a leave of absence.*
Those are examples of singular accusations resulting in men facing discipline, which is what you stated never happens (“…there’s no evidence supporting it, and a lot of history saying that things just don’t work that way.”). I maintain that it can, and does, happen exactly that way.
Again, I am not trying to defend these men, and for all I know they are guilty as hell, but you cannot simply hand-wave away the fact that men can be accused of this and then immediately face disciplinary consequences.
The cite offers brief highlights, the fact that an article doing a summary lists only one person’s accusation doesn’t mean only one person made an accusation. I looked into the first one in detail, and found the below which blows your claim completely out of the water. I’m not going to play the game where you cite a shotgun-blast of alleged examples, then I go and hunt down the details of each one to show how it doesn’t apply, because that’s an absurd amount of work.
So no, it’s not one person making allegations. It’s, once again multiple people with additional witnesses. In addition to that, he’s got a pattern of unprofessional behavior - showing up trashed at professional functions is the kind of thing that often gets you fired. Aside from the multiple witness issue, I don’t accept the idea that if someone commits multiple firing offenses it’s reasonable to claim that firing must have been only and solely for one particular one.
I will agree that if you have a history of showing up wasted at professional functions and get accused of doing something else wrong you can get fired, but the blame for that doesn’t rest entirely on the ‘something else’.
Most damning to using this as an example:
Actually, your first example shows a man who was “accused of this” and faced no disciplinary consequences until years later when multiple accusers came forward and the political environment changed radically. It’s not hand-waving to dismiss a list when your first example is a guy with multiple accusers, multiple causes for firing, and who got away apparently scott-free when there was only a single accuser.
I’ll do one more that I happened to read on, just to show that it’s not unreasonable for me to dismiss the list. Twiggy Ramirez, the former Marilyn Manson band member, wasn’t a manger of any sort, and Jessicka Addams (his accuser) didn’t work for or with him. The allegations are about actions during their private relationship. So he’s not a manger, she’s not a subordinate, and the actions aren’t workplace sexual harassment because they don’t work together. That alone renders it worthless as an example that counters my claim. Further, while bands are a business in a way, the relationship between band members is much more of a personal relationship than a regular business one, so I don’t really consider band member interpersonal drama to be much like regular workplace issues. Marilyn Manson’s ‘firing’ of him is much more like telling someone ‘I don’t want you around me anymore’ than getting a pink slip from corporate HR - and again isn’t because of anything that would count as workplace sexual harassment.
The leave of absence is also not really disciplinary action. It is most likely “someone needs to stay home during the investigation.” When I made my accusation, it was me who stayed home for six weeks while it was investigated. Then they discovered that there was an “inappropriate relationship” but didn’t want to fire the bastard - and that is how I ended up with an IT career instead of the Accounting career I was working on. They moved me to the expanding IT department to “get rid of me.”
If the accusers story is true, and you’ve made an victim work with her abuser for weeks while its investigated, you are opening yourself up to a whole lot of damages.
I’m killing time, and I didn’t realize how easy these were to disprove, so I’ve actually blown apart every single example on your list. I also want to point out that I made no statement about ‘facing discipline’ in spite of your claim above, I specifically said “get an innocent manger fired on the spot”. Someone getting paid leave while a situation is investigated is NOT the same thing as “an innocent manager fired on the spot”, and while I’m certainly willing to count “lost his job after a few weeks of investigation” in the category of “fired on the spot”, I’m not going to count paid time off.
So, another multiple victims case. Seeing a pattern here?
Again not a single accuser, the situation was actually witnessed and reported by a senior executive. Also whether he lost his job for it is murky based on the other comments.
So there are at least FIVE accusers for this one. And it involves a criminal complaint, not just allegations to HR which is what the original discussion implied. But really, ‘five or more’ people just is not the same thing as ‘single’.
And yet again it’s not just a sole accuser, there’s at least one witness. Also Venit hasn’t lost his job, he’s chosen to take a leave while it’s going on.