Sexual Harassment, Chapter 999This time the accused is Max Baucus. Do we know when to care
anymore?By Margaret Carlson
September 13, 1999
Web posted at: 3:42 p.m. EDT (1942 GMT)
Clinton, even before "fatigue" was attached to his name, had
ruined many things for me: running shorts, McDonald's,
whitewater, anything in navy from the Gap. Now he's gone and
taken all the appeal out of that journalistic treasure house: a
sexual-harassment charge against a prominent politician.
Last week my blood just didn't race in that Paula Jones way when
Roll Call ran the story that Montana Senator Max Baucus, 57 and
married, had fired his chief of staff, Christine Niedermeier, 47
and not married, under contested circumstances. He said it was
because of staff complaints that she was a lousy manager who was
causing staff defections. She said (and only reluctantly when she
realized there was going to be a story critical of her) that it
was because she had asked him to stop making sexual advances. He
then said she was making that up to divert attention from her bad
performance and that he had a petition signed by 36 staff members
attesting to it. She then contended he had trumped up the
management excuse--and produced the petition--after he got
unjustifiably concerned that she was going to go public with her
accusations. Baucus has denied making any such advances and says
he wants her to present her case in court under oath. She hasn't
decided whether to go further because Senate procedure requires
that she first exhaust her administrative remedies on his playing
field, where the Senate provides him with counsel.
As the statements and counterstatements piled ever higher, I
wondered if there was a thong or late-night pizza in the stack
somewhere, a grope in a private study while a head of state was
arriving for dinner or, better yet, some tapes, preferably of
phone sex. It's going to take a lot to engage a jaded, sated
public in yet another one of these cases, exhausted as we are by
years of Clinton scandals and the sexual-harassment suit of the
century, which came to resemble an Italian opera. Everyone is
dead at the end.
But the Jones case didn't just drain our collective attention
span. It alerted us to just how much the law of sexual harassment
had expanded over the past decade. We moved from a time when a
boss asking a woman to get the coffee or meet him in the file
closet was neither a cause nor a cause of action, to a time when
one pass or one bad joke is enough for a lawsuit. Plaintiffs can
go on fishing expeditions so extensive that consensual affairs
are fair game and totally innocent bystanders can be subpoenaed
to prove that they were promoted on merit and not because they
slept with the boss. Many corporations are adopting protective
policies designed to cleanse the workplace of any sex, in hopes
of preventing the actionable kind. Power is presumed to
contaminate all workplace relationships. That means someone in an
inferior position is thought incapable of freely agreeing to one,
and an executive who wants to get involved with an underling does
so at his peril.
Since work is where we spend most of our time and where many of
us meet our spouses, you have to wonder whether all this
regulation isn't threatening the propagation of the species.
Other freedoms, like speech and association, were getting
shortchanged in the rush to protect women from sexual harassment.
Almost everyone was alarmed when one guy was fired for repeating
a Seinfeld joke at the water cooler.
Feminists did not realize how much the law had tilted in favor of
the victims until they found themselves on the side of the
accused. Many were in the disingenuous position of arguing that
Paula Jones really didn't have anything to complain about when
asked to "kiss it" but that Anita Hill just a few years earlier
deserved our wholehearted concern.
I knew the public had just had it with the he-said, she-said
battles when Juanita Broaddrick gave interviews last year in
which she said that then Governor Bill Clinton had forced himself
on her, and the controversy lasted barely 1 1/2 news cycles. But
even as I see the word quagmire forming in my brain, I realize we
can't abandon the field. As a former Connecticut state legislator
and two-time Democratic nominee for Congress, Niedermeier can
probably take care of herself. But there are plenty of women out
there with fewer resources who can't. Just last week the women at
two Ford Motor Co. plants finally got the firm to acknowledge
that life for them had been hellish--that they should no longer be
subjected to obscene graffiti, verbal and physical abuse and
retaliation for complaining about it. In a settlement, Ford
agreed to pay them nearly $8 million and to ensure that three
years from now, 30% of its supervisors will be women. So just
because we're tired of Clinton doesn't mean we should tire of the
cause. Boredom shouldn't make us forget that bad things still
happen to good women.
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Cover Date: September 20, 1999
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