The Wash Rag Issue 5.1 March 1997 THE ARMY RESPONDS CLEAR TO THE TOP! The reports on sexual harassment in the Army continue to be prominent in the news, though it would seem that there must eventually be an end to them. After all, we were finally spared more of the O. J. Simpson fiasco. There have been some reports that Army investigators have exaggerated the charges against some of the drill instructors at Aberdeen, and charges against the one originally charged, Staff Sgt. Nathanael C. Beach, were finally dropped because the woman who made them, Jessica Bleckley, was not in good enough emotional condition to testify. In addition, charges have been made that she is not a truthful person, although in a situation like this, charges like that would be almost a forgone conclusion. Erick Robertson, a soldier who had consentual sex with a subordinant at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, was courtmartialed and kicked out of the military. But the charges against Sgt. Maj. of the Army Gene McKinney, the Army’s top enlisted man, made by Sgt. Maj. Brenda Hoster, who was once a member of McKinney’s staff, are being prosecuted. According to Hoster, they were on a business trip to Hawaii, and when staying at Scofield Barracks in Hawaii, he came to her hotel room and made verbal approaches. He kissed her even though she repeatedly let him know that he was acting in an unprofessional manner, and refused to leave her room. He told her he was aroused and wanted her too observe this, and said to her that he could take her right there and then. She told him he’d better kill her if he did, because if she lived she would tell. When she refused, he continued to make approaches. Afterwards, she told friends about the encounter, both at the time and back at the pentagon. She later reported it to an officer but got no sympathy from him. She found it so difficult to work with McKinney after that, that eventually she retired. Later she read that McKinney had been put on a blue ribbon panel to investigate sexual harassment in the Army and decided to lodge a complaint. Hoster says that she is willing to undergo public scrutiny if it helps just one woman in a sexual harassment situation. McKinney resigned from the panel and has also been suspended from active duty. It seems to be incomprehensible that a person such as McKinney, a black who had been raised in poverty but who had reached an extremely high position, would gamble it all on such a risky and transitory action. Now faced with anything from a reprimand to a court martial, it seems truly a waste to have such an exemplary role model for young blacks be ruined. It appears that sexual harassment hurts everyone, and that those perpetrating it should realize that if exposed, they will suffer as much as the victims. Perhaps then it will stop. The Omaha World Herald is quoted in the Nebraska Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Coalition Newsletter in a Pentagon survey that found that only 55% of women had experienced some form of sexual harassment in the past year, which they say represented a drop of 9% from 1988. It is felt that at that rate, sexual harassment in the military should be virtually eliminated by 2048 . PAULA JONES ON 60 MINUTES A March report on the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against President Clinton seems to have been the most comprehensive we’ve seen. Since both sides were reported, it was interesting to try to second guess what the Supreme Court will decide. According to Arkansas State Trooper, Danny Ferguson, Paula Jones told him she found then-Governor Clinton good looking and that he had sexy hair. For whatever reason, the trooper relayed this to Clinton (maybe it is a guy thing), and the Governor sent a message back and he says that Paula Jones and Clinton were flirting. He says that Clinton said he was waiting for a phone call from the White House and needed a hotel room, so he took him to one, and then Clinton told him to tell Paula Jones to come up and meet him. Paula Jones herself says that when the trooper told her the Governor wanted to meet her, she was excited and went up to the hotel room. She says that the Governor immediately tried to make physical contact with her and eventually unzipped his pants. She left the room and went back down to her post. Another woman there said Paula Jones was shaking, but Ferguson says that she asked whether Clinton had a girl friend and when the trooper said no, she allegedly said that she would be it. Ferguson says that all Clinton ever said about it was that nothing happened. Paula Jones said that she does not feel that people take her seriously about the matter. Clinton’s lawyer, Bennet, denies Jones’ allegations. Clinton himself refuses comment. Bennet tried to settle out of court. In Clinton’s proposed settlement, he states that he can’t remember meeting her but may have. Penthouse Magazine printed nude pictures of Paula Jones taken by a former boyfriend. He sold them to Penthouse for $50,000.00. She says that she felt humiliated when this happened, and that the boyfriend had taken the pictures they were in a relationship,saying that he just wanted mementoes. She says she wants an apology from the president, she wants everyone to stop lying and she wants her reputation back. I think it will be “in her dreams” on all 3 counts. The Supreme Court of the United States will rule in the near future on whether the civil case against a President in office can be heard. ON THE JOB WOMEN FIGHT BACK Tom Brockaw reported that sexual harassment settlements are up four times since 1990, and he suggested that it is because women are mad and won’t take it any more. But a footnote to that report noted that Federal cases have doubled since the Hill/Thomas affair, and I am more inclined to believe that once the sexual harassment cat was, so to speak, out of the bag, other women felt courage to follow in Hill’s footsteps. According to the National NOW Times, NOW continues to follow the Mitsubishi matter, in which the EEOC says 300 - 500 women were sexually harassed at the companies Normal, Illinois plant. Twenty-nine women have filed a civil suit against Mitsubishi charging similar behavior on the part of the company. NOW activists in New York City picketed Saks Fifth Avenue and forced the company to back down when it attempted to limit its liability of an employee’s rape of a co-worker. This brings to mind a news report that I heard on public radio a few days ago. The report was about a reporter (now deceased) that was the subject of a documentary or a book. I wasn’t very interested in the story at the beginning, so neglected to get his name down, and I am sure that I had never heard it before. This particular reporter had told about how, at age 19, working for a Pittsburg paper, he had lost faith in the system. He was told to cover a story about a salesgirl at a Pittsburgh department store who had been raped by one of her bosses. He wrote the story and showed it to his editor, who asked for two copies of it. One of the copies he provided went to the editorial department and the other to the business office. One of the ad salesmen was dispatched to the department store with a copy of the story which was shown to the manager of the store, the father of the man accused of the rape. He was told that although they had previously purchased two pages of advertising a week, they would now purchase four pages, and by the way, they had decided not to print the story. This is a slant on “quid pro quo” which seems to have been ignored by everyone. It seems particularly abhorrent that the victim of such an assault should be the vehicle for the newspaper to increase its revenues. Perhaps this has changed, but it often seems that rather than intelligence, ability, hard work and skill turning the wheels of industry, it is “who knows what about who” that does. This reporter apparently spent his life between one job and another, publishing a newsletter closed down by McCarthy (as though the truth were anti-American) and a farm in Vermont. I’ll be looking for the story in case it should turn up on public TV. I was between my oatmeal and my bran muffin when it ran, so didn’t take any notes. Darn! How can women expect any justice from a system that tolerates such injustice? Can judges, lawyers, police, prosecutors and witnesses as easily use information to buy themselves favors? How can the conservatives blame the increase in crime on the demise of the family when those in power have so little respect for the truth? Women are the victims, not the perpetrators of the decrease in importance played by family life. Giving women more power to protect themselves challenges the system, and those in control don’t want that to happen. They want to keep women in a state of perpetual victimization, because it fuels their system. I am moved to comment, though, after the fiasco of the Simpson trial, that it almost appears that women may have already attained equality. I read in a book, Games Your Mother Never Taught You, that women will have attained equality when they have the same right to be incompetent as men. It doesn’t appear that trial was competently prosecuted by Marcia Clark. SEXUAL HARASSMENT AS ENTERTAINMENT POTPOURRI: IN THE MEDIA A February Maloney on CBS was mostly about a Judge who used his position to force women to have sex with him, in one case it was a child custody matter, in another the parole of a woman’s husband. This seemed to be extremely close to the Tennessee case in which Judge David Lanier was convicted in 1993 on federal charges. Four of the women filing complaints against Lanier were court or county employees, and one was a job applicant whose child custody case Lanier could have influenced. Unlike reality (the Supreme Court ruled that there are no constitutional protections against sexual assaults against women by public officials), Malony, who is a police psychiatrist and is working with a woman who complains about the Judge’s actions, manages to prove that the Judge is sexually harassing clients, and has him removed from office. I suppose that is why we watch programs like this, because the punishment of the wicked is swift and sure, where in reality it is slow and ineffective. I don’t understand the prosecution in the Lanier case, which was under a federal law which makes it a crime for government officials to use their official authority willfully to deprive someone of rights protected by the Constitution. Why didn’t they charge him with assault? Or isn’t assault against any Federal statutes? If an employee assaults his boss on Federal property, isn’t that prosecuted as a physical assault? I’m very sure it is. I don’t see any difference between the two, except that the rape is more emotionally damaging. It sounds to me like the prosecution wasn’t all that serious in this matter, or they would have made charges that they knew would stick. Also in the same program, Maloney’s daughter was doing homework for a boy in school who was using her crush on him to his benefit. She finally realized that he was using her. A January JAG addressed sexual harassment in the Military. In this program, a female pilot on an aircraft carrier files a sexual harassment suit against fellow officers for behavior at a party crossing the equator. The Judge Advocate General’s office goes out to investigate it. A female senator comes out to make sure the female pilot gets a fair shake. She pulls strings and gets the female pilot’s status to fly back against the wishes of her commanding officer. She had lost this just two days before the party. She goes out on a night flight with another female pilot and performs fairly well, but they are called back because of foul weather. One of the planes crashes on landing but the pilot is pulled from the wreckage alive. It was hard to tell whether it was the one who had filed the suit or the other. It wasn’t clear why the crash occurred, either. It left me with more questions than answers. I am sure I must have missed something. I was a little bit put off by a flirtation between the male on the JAG team and one of the ship’s female officers. For one thing, I believe it might have been against military law, and for another it left me with the feeling that indeed, men and women can’t have a professional relationship without sex being injected into it. I find that depressing. AROUND THE STATE CASES AND PANELS Accvording to an Argus Leader article, a Blackhawk woman, Carol Maicki, is on a panel to monitor abuse for the secretary of defense. She recently returned from committee meetings at the Pentagon, where officials described their strategy for eliminating harassment. She was appointed to the Women in Services Committee for the last year of her term. They visit military bases, do interviews and makes recommendations to the secretary of defense on gender issues. She was appointed chairman of a subcommittee on equality management. She wants to develop methods for women to report sexual harassment without jeopardizing their careers, something that Maicki says is not possible at this time. A former Miller doctor, Gary Engelmann, has been charged with the rapes of eight patients because he sexually penetrated them while performing pelvic exams. As detailed in another Argus Leader article, he originally pled guilty to one charge of rape in a plea bargain and was sentenced to 20 years, but was allowed to drop his guilty plea and stand trial. A University of South Dakota professor, Robert Hilderbrand, was charged with violating the school’s policy on sexual harassment. An Argus Leader editorial found the University negligent in refusing to disclose the specifics of Hilderbrand’s conduct. Hildebrand has been teaching at the University for sixteen years, and has been honored as an adviser and as teacher of the year. He has been removed as chairman of the history department and ousted as an adviser to the Truman Scholarship program. Hilderbrand says that there was no allegation of sexual behavior, but says the student took exception to his paternalism, which he implies took the form of comforting a student with problems, and gives the example of putting his arm on a person’s shoulder to comfort them. Of course, we believe him. That doesn’t sound like grounds for such severe punishment to me. We have been contacted by Working Against Violence, Inc., a Rapid City organization, about a Rapid City woman who was trying on clothes in a Rapid City store when one of the salesmen opened the curtain to her dressing room. At the time, she had on no slacks, and he came in and put his hands down her underpants. The Rapid City police refused to take a complaint on this. The Working Against Violence counselor says that the police continue to refuse to take a complaint, the store insists that the worker has worked there for many years and that they’ve had no previous complaints against him (little wonder if the police refuse to take any), and they were only able to respond by sending the store information about sexual harassment. On the surface, this seems to be pretty benign, but there is a sinister underpinning to this. I have also had trouble getting the police to take complaints. About five years ago, I took a beautiful pet cat to a Sioux Falls veterinarian, and when I called to see how she was, I was told that she had died. A year later, I moved to my current residence (I lived on the edge of Sioux Falls at the time), and here I receive Sioux City television better than Sioux Falls most of the time, so I watch it just as much. One night I saw a commercial for a South Sioux City, Nebraska veterinarian which featured a number of individuals who were carrying their pets. There I saw my cat, a beautiful white cat with a gold spot (just like her mother, who I still have) between her right ear and her right eye. When I went to the Sioux Falls police to place a complaint, they refused to take one. Now, I certainly don’t expect the Sioux Falls police to make a major investigation into a veterinarian allegedly stealing my beautiful pet and selling or giving it to some associate, but if nobody takes a complaint, there will be no record of this patently illegal and immoral act. If someone else comes along in a month or a year with the same complaint, there will be no record of it and that person will get the same treatment, as will some future victimized woman in Rapid City. I find this a pathetic attempt by South Dakota officials to falsify crime statistics by allowing South Dakota women to be victimized at will by individuals who know that they are safe from prosecution. In an even more sinister scenario, I have had problems with unexplained intrusions into my home by unknown individuals, and by unknown means. There are no signs of forced entry, but there have been items stolen, and frequently, from my pantry, office, and closet, and I have no way of finding out how or even why this is happening, though I suspect that it has to do with my age and marital status. I have tried to make complaints with the sheriff, but as far as I know, if any complaints have been recorded, they have been few. This is troubling enough. But then one sees reports of individuals who have committed suicide in locked houses and there is “No sign of forced entry.” Friends and family insist that the individual was not depressed and that there were many indications that they would not have committed suicide, like planned vacations, financial security, running successful businesses, happily helping organize the wedding of a child, etc. If my theory that there are some kind of concealed entrances into these houses for use in continuous roberies is correct, then the suicides of these people might have been rigged to cover up when the person intruding was accidentally observed using one of these entrances. Everytime I find something I saw in my pantry before I went to town missing when I get home, I have the horrible vision that one day I will come out of my bathroom pulling my pants up and see someone disappearing into the floor, and realizing that I saw him, he comes back and fakes a suicide to assure his secrecy. I’ve had thousands of dollars of personal property stolen not to mention family heirlooms, antique photographs and souvenirs that are irreplaceable. And I don’t think that a fraction of the reports I have made to the sheriff have been officially documented. Perhaps he did document my finding last fall. When I got back from Rochester, I had to go into my basement to put heat tapes on some water pipes that have frozen every winter since I moved here. I started where there was evidence of water damage, and tore away some insulation that I had stuffed in to try to protect the pipes. When I tore it away, a lot of material which seemed to me like dirt and leaves cascaded down on me. I also observed that while I recalled putting a large piece of plastic over the insulation, there was now a large piece of plywood or wall board there, and that the pipes were configured differently than I remembered them. But I was in a hurry, and started to wind the heat tapes around the pipes. As I progressed along the pipes, I realized that I would have to remove more insulation in order to finish winding the tapes, so I moved the stepladder and using a utility knife, I cut away more insulation and the vaporseal. Eventually I came to a thin metal trap door, which covered part of the sewer pipe, and which I later learned was there so the pipe could be cleaned out in case of a blockage. Rather than get the screw driver to remove the screws that held it in place, I just cut the insulation around it away, and when I did, some more material cascaded all over me. When I got down to pick up something off the floor, I found a half dozen pieces of dog feces among the miscellaneous dirt that had fallen all over me. I shudder to think what else was in with them. When I got into the house, I was covered with this material and had the feeling that I should burn my clothing, but just showered and washed the clothes instead. Hopefully, when I took this to the sheriff, a report was made on it. No wonder I’ve had continuous health problems since moving here. OUT OF TOUCH? ACADEMIA AND REALITY Last summer, at the annual autograph party for regional authors at Augustana College, I had the privilege of sitting next to David Allen and Jan Evans. This was particularly interesting for me because I had been in China with my daughter the previous year, and they had lived there for a year as visiting scholars at a Chinese university. I have confessed to close friends that since taking a course my last year in college in which I had to read a whole novelle in German every week, I’ve had trouble getting myself to take on long term reading projects. Maybe it has something to do th all of the IBM manuals that I’ve gagged my way through as well, but I bought their book, titled Double Happiness, which is a compendium of the diaries they each kept during the year, and I’ve been working on reading it since. The truth is that it is interesting, and they talk not only about the students and faculty at the university, but also about daily life there, about various trips they took to see special scenic and historical sites, about traveling in China, etc. I’ve found it very revealing about China and about them. But one description brought me up short. “The other night Jan’s former student, a young man studying dermatology, told us that he and his associates are constantly having to pretend to like their work and the Party. This is especially true at meetings, at which everybody sits around praising the Party line, apparently. No criticism, no objections to anything. Everything is simply accepted as right. He spoke of the ‘freedoms’ in America, said his father has said he should go there and live . . .” I was open-mouthed in astonishment. I suppose that at an institution like SDSU, David has probably never encountered the megalomaniac mentality one finds at the average large corporation. He has apparently never sat through a project meeting where nobody dares voice a word of criticism or even question anything that happens. I was once fired from a Federal job, apparently because I asked my supervisor whether he was aware of a regulation which I felt he had ordered me to falsify. I didn’t accuse him of anything. I didn’t threaten to report him. I just asked him whether he was aware of it. And although I have only rarely worked for small businesses, I suspect that they are even worse than large businesses and the government. I have often heard criticism of academics because they are said to be out of touch with reality, and this really impressed on me that it could at times be true. David and Jan, I love your book, you are certainly excellent writers, and your portrayal of China was worth the trouble to read, but you need to get in touch with some of the politics in your own country before you criticize those in another. And if you think that an American employer isn’t just as able to absolutely destroy the career of one of their employees as the Chinese government, I am sure that I would be joined by many others, especially government whistle-blowers, who will attest to my claims. I don’t include this to trivialize the Evans, but to call attention to this discrepancy. And I feel sorry for people who migrate to this country thinking differently of it than it actually is. We simply don’t have the right to criticize another government if our own is similarly to be criticized. TO THE CONTRARY FUNDING Recently I have noticed that To The Contrary, the PBS panel discussion program relating to women’s issues, is now subsidized by Mitsubishi. It goes without saying that I hope this is an attempt by Mitsubishi to improve its image, and that To The Contrary has not jeopardized its position in covering sexual harassment issues in order to obtain funding. Because To The Contrary has in the past provided a sound discussion of this issue, it is of concern that the program maintain its independence in this area. The WASH RAG is published by Women Against Sexual Harassment, P. O. Box 164, Canton, South Dakota 57013-0164. ISSN 1068-2449. Subscription price is $10.00 a year. Copyright 1997 Tesseract Publications.