In the last year or so there have been dozens of reports of famous men harassing, groping, grabbing, assaulting, and intruding on the dressing rooms of women. Some have forced women into sexual relationships as a condition of continued employment and others have committed rape.
The offenders have included Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Casey Affleck, Bill O'Reilly (and a host of other Fox News anchors and execs), as well as other entertainment industry and major corporate figures.
These men and their companies had paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in secret settlements, with payments contingent on stringent non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to keep their crimes hidden.
These NDAs are, plainly put, evil. They allow men to repeatedly harass, grope, grab, assault and rape women for years after their initial assaults.
The lawyers of the victims, of course, get a huge chunk of these settlements, often worth $20 or $30 million in the case of Fox News. These lawyers have no incentive to stop the assaults and hypocritically claim that they are "helping" women. Here's how Gloria Allred rationalizes it:
“My duty as an attorney is to my client and to assist her and protect her and support her in what she thinks is best for her life,” Ms. Allred told me. “I don’t think any woman should be sacrificed for the ‘cause.’”Allred doesn't think any woman should be sacrificed for the cause? These NDAs shield sex offenders from criminal prosecution, allowing them to repeat their crimes over and over, for five, 10, 15, 20 years. Allred's client might have gotten a payout, but the women these scumbags assault after Allred teaches the offenders how to cover their tracks won't have any leverage and will get nothing.
For a number of women, she said, a confidential settlement is the right outcome. “Some clients want to protect their privacy — they don’t want anybody to know,” she said.
In most cases, Ms. Allred said, if there is no confidentiality agreement, there is no shot at a settlement. And she disputed the notion that out-of-court settlements somehow let the alleged harassers off scot-free.
”If the accused sexual harasser is paying my client $500,000, or $1 million or $2 million, that’s not nuisance value,” she said. “That’s an admission that the accused feels that he has risk and that he has done something that he should not have done.”
Why should the other women be sacrificed so Allred's client can have a big payday?
Harvey Weinstein has been accused of assaulting more than 50 women. If he had been exposed by his first accuser and charged by the police, dozens of women would have been spared the pain and degradation of Weinstein's crimes.
If Republicans in Congress are serious about stopping men like Harvey Weinstein, they should pass legislation to require all NDAs imposed on victims of sexual harassment to be filed and approved by the courts.
They should also pass a law to make corporate management and human resources personnel mandatory reporters of sexual assault allegations. There is ample precedent for mandatory reporting laws, which are already on the books in all states for child abuse. Employees are vulnerable people by definition because of the asymmetric power dynamic: their livelihoods depend on retaining the good graces of their bosses.
If Republicans like Mike Pence and John Kelly think women are so "sacred," why do they stand idly by while men like Trump, O'Reilly, Ailes and Weinstein peep at, grope, grab and rape female employees for years on end?
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