Back in July, when this thread started, Fox commentator Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against Fox News and Roger Ailes after her contract wasn't renewed.
Today it was announced that Andrea Tarantos
didn't get her contract renewed. So she's doing the same thing. She's now filing a harassment suit against Ailes and Fox.
Two point need to be made:
1). Sexual harassment payoffs are becoming the new alimony.
Firing has become like divorce for women -- a way to cash in. As with marriage cases, there is a lot of grey area. What might have been a humorous exchange in an office or in the living room gets redefined as harassing behavior when they're enemies.
Example? A lot of men and women have jokes along the line of "I've been bad." "Yeah -- you need to be spanked!" These are harmless enough in the kitchen or meeting room. But read aloud in a court of law they can seem positively sinister.
2). Don't be surprised when women who are all about sex make everything about sex.
It's not a coincidence that these lawsuits are related to sex. When a woman's entire working life revolves around how many people are looking at her tits or legs, that doesn't just stop when she gets fired. They find a way to continue getting the same attention. Viewers can't tune in anymore to see their bodies...but they can now hear about them in the news.
Moral: Don't think you can hire a hooker and get away with not paying. Carlson and Tarantos were selling sexual services. Not on a person-to-person level, but to viewers. It might not be the same thing to you and me, but in their minds it is.
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As for these suits themselves, do I think there is any merit? Judging from what I've read, I don't think that's the issue. To determine that, you'd need to have a camera running 24/7 in the office monitoring everyone.
So I think the issue is that nearly anything you say or do in an office to a woman can easily be re-contextualized to sound sexual and/or sinister if that's how they want it to appear.
Should we fear all women, then? No, because most women have some sense of shame. A sense of shame prevents the following from happening:
"Hey gang! I'm making a KFC run. Who wants legs and who wants breasts?"
"OMG! That's harassment! Get him!! Get him!!!!!!!"
Most women would feel embarrassed to behave like this. What kind of women wouldn't? I know! The kind who aren't embarrassed to appear on TV each night in a micro-minis and push-up bras.
This is what Fox brought into the workplace when they hired the journalistic equivalent of strippers. I wouldn't be surprised if the next woman they let go also files a suit. And the one after that.