Recently Lisa Beauchamp sued her employer, the Teamsters Local 150 in Sacramento, for sexual harassment after a union official said not-sexy sex things to her, touched her inappropriately, and traded massages with a group of “office party girls” during workplace functions. A jury found for Beauchamp, but dang—she lost on a legal technicality. Now the Teamsters’ lawyer is saying dumb things … as lawyers involved in these cases sometimes do.
What kind of dumb things? Well, The Sacramento Bee reports, the Teamsters’ lawyer believes the jury’s finding “doesn’t really mean anything, and that his client is completely exonerated.” Oh?
“There is a finding there was some harassing conduct, but they never reached the issue of whether it was severe or pervasive, or whether a reasonable person would have been offended,” attorney John C. Provost said. “So none of those issues were really reached.”
Whoa, wait: Provost’s client won because of a statute of limitations issue. The “11-woman, one-man jury” found that Beauchamp had, in fact, experienced “unwanted harassing conduct” during her employment with the union. Maybe the jurors’ decision doesn’t mean anything to Provost, but it probably means something to Beauchamp. And that should count for something, right?
The Teamster lawyer’s statement is dumb, but it’s not the worst one ever made by a defense lawyer in a sexual harassment (or sex discrimination) suit. So, what is? I don’t know! But I have found several possibilities. These 14 “defenses,” culled from the deepest, darkest corners of Google’s archives, don’t always win over the hearts and minds of juries, but they do succeed in causing nausea, outrage, and hives. Check ’em out, fragile little ladies:
The Crybaby Defense
Let’s start this off with a bang, shall we? In May 2010, a federal jury in Manhattan found that Novartis, your friendly Swiss drug company, had been discriminating against its saleswomen, and returned a punitive damages award worth $250 million. Though their legal strategy was a total failure, Novartis’ lawyers did receive certificates of recognition from the American Bar Association’s somewhat marginal Extreme-Douchebag Lawyers’ Division for “most outstanding display of doucheytude in a civil trial.”
“I’ve never seen anybody cry so much on the witness stand in my life…She didn’t have very much to cry about…It’s like she had been knifed. Honestly. What was wrong with this woman? She was so fragile,” said lead defense lawyer Richard Schnadig, who sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night to eat mustard-and-kitten sandwiches. Schnadig also called a second witness “that little blond that came up here from Texas” (apparently not everything from Texas is big after all??) and complained that one of the plaintiffs was a “troubled” person whose testimony was “highly emotional” and “ridiculous.”
The evening after the verdict was announced, Schnadig went home, put on his Superman PJs, curled up on his sofa under his favorite blankie, and wept like his career had been knifed (probably).
The Nuts and Sluts Defense
Susan Estrich, a political science and law professor at the University of Southern California, uses this term to describe what she calls “one of the oldest tactics in the book”: questioning a woman’s mental state to make her seem unstable, and using her sexual history to undermine her moral character. It’s used quite often by defense lawyers in sexual harassment and discrimination suits, but is also popular in criminal trials—for example, the mid-aughts sexual assault case of basketball player Kobe Bryant. Bryant’s lawyers demanded to see his accuser’s mental health records, and also suggested that she’d been promiscuous; New York Newsday writer Lorraine Dusky went so far as to describe their invasive info-seeking as “amoral antics,” singling out lawyer Pamela Mackey with particular scorn. (Charges against Bryant were dropped when his accuser declined to participate in the trial; the two parties eventually reached a settlement.)
The “Not a Slut, Let’s Go With Nut” Defense
A lawyer for Merrill Lynch tried to discredit sex discrimination plaintiff Nancy Thomas by characterizing her as “hard to get along with,” resistant to performing clerical anything, and afflicted with a “personality disorder.” Thomas’s case had “nothing to do with discrimination, harassment or retaliation,” he argued, downplaying just a bit that she’d had an “obscene photo dropped at her desk; a dildo and lubricating cream left for her in the mailroom; and [witnessed] an office incident in which a male broker allegedly pulled down the underwear of a Merrill woman.” Just fun and games! No, Thomas’s problem was a broken marriage engagement from long ago that “haunted her for the rest of her career and the rest of her life.” She was haunted! Like a haunted house, in a way. But instead of being full of ghosts, her life was full of balled up tissues (which slightly resembled ghosts, in a way).
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