Once upon a time, judges gave workplace jerks a pass if they were “equal opportunity offenders.” That defense doesn’t seem to fly these days.
Consider the recent case of a North Carolina doctor, the owner of a family medicine practice, who was sued for sexual harassment by a female colleague.
The female physician claimed she’d been subjected to four years of inappropriate comments and behaviors from her boss before she finally got fed up and resigned.
Her complaints outlined a steady stream of boorish behavior — her boss discussing his marital sex life, commenting on the female physician’s breasts and referring to female staffers as “sluts” are some of the less-egregious examples — but the boss had a simple explanation:
He treated everybody that way.
Crude to ‘men and women alike’
And his employees confirmed it. In court, one worker testified that the doctor would make sexually offensive remarks to “anybody, anytime.” The doctor claimed he couldn’t be guilty of sexually harassing a single employee because “he was generally a crude person who made vulgar comments to men and women alike.”
A district court went for the “equal opportunity offender” defense and dismissed the suit.
But a federal appeals court saw it differently. There, the judges found that while the boss was indeed an overall crude individual, his comments were almost invariably demeaning to women.
The evidence, the court said, indicated that the boss “crossed the line from general crudity into actionable harassment by subjecting (the female colleague) to a series of sexually graphic and unmistakably personal remarks that made her work environment intensely uncomfortable.”
The appeals court remanded the case back to the lower court. You know what that means: Either an expensive trial or an expensive settlement. Our money’s on the latter.
For a full look at the decision in EEOC v. Fairbrook Medical Clinic, go here.
