What It's Like to Be Sexually Harassed at Work - Part I

It's not scary, it's not traumatizing, it's not sympathetic. It's just sad.

Photo by Heike Trautmann on Unsplash

This is a “Me Too” story, from someone who had very little sympathy for Me Too.

I’ll put my cards on the table at the outset, and say that I thought most of the big headline stories were a bunch of overwrought nonsense. Oh, you wanted to be a famous movie star, so you took a meeting in a hotel room with the most notorious scumbag in the business, and it was really gross letting an ogre like Weinstein put his mouth on you and then you didn’t even get a good part out of it. Eh, he was a lecherous ogre, and you were desperate for fame, which is unfortunate, but not the worst tragedy in the world.

My story isn’t a tragedy either. It’s just a story about how these things tend to actually go down, for every-day people. I would provide a “trigger warning” about multiple physical assaults, but I don’t need to, because they won’t trigger anyone – they’re not scary, they’re pathetic.

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not a sexy story. At all. It’s not one of those stories that people read in the newspaper and become simultaneously appalled and turned on, enjoying the lurid details from a morally superior remove. There is nothing to envy here, and nothing to be turned on by. It’s grossly mundane. I was not vulnerable, nor afraid. I was not traumatized. He was not very powerful, he was pitiful. The person who got hurt was his wife. There’s no terrified innocent woman overwhelmed by a predatory beast, there’s no vengeance. Just fools being weak.

But my reason for telling this story is because I want to use it to illustrate why I think our laws and our cultural conceptions about these things are mostly wrong-headed, with confused underlying premises.

So this is Part I of the story of how I was sexually harassed as a new lawyer, by a senior lawyer in a position of authority. A man who absolutely knew better, yet did not stop himself from acting like an undignified fool. A man I mostly hated for a while, but eventually forgave and was able to laugh about the whole thing. A man that years later, I now consider a dear friend. Even his wife, who was the most done-dirty in this story, is now (as far as I can tell) over it.

It will be in three parts, because whenever I omit details, people fill them in with entirely wrong assumptions:

Part I: the background and context that built up to the first big incident.

Part II: the ongoing circus, what happened to end it, what my calculations were in deciding how to deal with it, and how we eventually ended up friends.

Part III: some thoughts on the current state of the laws and cultural norms, what people get wrong, and how they craft narratives to suit their own purposes. Where I think the real harm and fault lies, some possible solutions, plus a few philosophical musings on topics such as whether it’s remotely reasonable for most men to work closely with attractive young women, love, lust, free will, forgiveness, etc.

PART I – HOW I ENDED UP WRESTLING WITH MY BOSS

The Setting

The most important context here is that this all happened immediately after Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, and the world was plunging into the GFC. I was a new associate in a law firm, meaning I had the good luck NOT to have to watch half my hard-earned 401k balance disappear, like most of my coworkers. But that’s only because I barely had a balance in the first place.

Every week there was news of another law firm announcing mass layoffs, and we were all petrified that we were next. If you lost your job, it was clear there would be no opening to replace it. No one was hiring. The only lawyers who weren’t terrified were the bankruptcy attorneys, who were sitting pretty. I was a corporate/M&A associate, which was about the worst place to be, as every deal dried up and disappeared.

The point is, I had no sense of job security when this all went down. And I also had no resources to fall back on. I had purchased a 900-sq-ft junky house in a bad neighborhood the year before law school, for less than what an Audi Q8 would cost today. But any small amount of equity I had in the house was wiped out when home prices fell in the collapse. I also had about $50,000 in student loans from law school to pay off. So between my negligible 401k, my house, my mortgage, my Ford Focus, and my student loans, everything I owned in the world amounted to a negative net worth.

I had also made the somewhat insane decision to move across the country after college, to a place thousands of miles from any family, and that was where I went to law school and got licensed. So if shit went down, I didn’t have any family members I could move in with or beg to let me sleep on their couch. Nor did I have the ability to move back home, since I now owned a house that was underwater, and I couldn’t practice law in another state anyway, and no one was hiring.

So first and foremost, I needed to keep my job. I had held many crappy jobs throughout high school, college, and after graduating, and knew precisely how much worse things could be. Which was exactly why I’d decided to go to law school in the first place. Having a job where I had an actual office, with a door that shut, and I was treated with a modicum of respect and not questioned for clocking in 3 minutes late or taking an extra 90 seconds in the bathroom was like a dream come true. I was also making three times as much money as I’d ever made before, and knew exactly how lucky I was.

As it turned out, that private office with a door that closed was not quite so wonderful in all circumstances. But even once I was getting into wrestling matches with my boss, it never once crossed my mind that I could simply quit. I knew way too many lawyers out of work, and none of them could find another job.