Ignoring Fishy Horseplay Is Sexual Harassment

[The Straight Story]

Ignoring Fishy Horseplay Is Sexual Harassment

BATON ROUGE (CN) - A federal judge should not have based an engineer's sexual harassment claims on whether the offending male supervisor was gay, the 11th Circuit ruled.

While working for Shaw Coastal on a survey crew, John Cherry said he endured months of harassment from his supervisor, Michael Reasoner. The interactions allegedly started with Reasoner making Cherry uncomfortable by brushing against him, escalating to more obvious physical contact like Reasoner putting his hand on Cherry's butt.

Reasoner also regularly talked about Cherry's looks, asking him to take off his pants and his shirt. By the next month, Reasoner was sending Cherry explicit text messages, like, "I want cock," and "ur 2 sexy. U drive me insane. ... Ur sexy voice puts me to slumber."

Using a nickname for his penis, Cherry also sent a text saying, "your missing the dipper."
Cherry and his direct supervisor, Scott Thornton, reported the interactions to a project manager and another superior, but they dismissed the reports as "horsing around" and never reported it to human resources. Thornton had said Reasoner touched Cherry, "like I do my wife."

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/26/43385.htm

[cthulu2016]

1. The trial judge could have used the harassment as prima face evidence of sexual interest

I agree with the appeals court that it is nuts to require corientatinal interest to define sexual harassment.

Tangentially, but the lower court decision has a comical aspect...

The same-sex harassment complaint was ruled invalid because there was no evidence that the harasser was gay.

Ummm... how much evidence do they want?

Texting another man "ur 2 sexy. U drive me insane" and "I want cock" is not proof that a man is gay, but it is certainly sufficiently suggestive of some sort of sexual interest that the lower court could have used the harassment itself as evidence of sexual interest.

So what did the lower court want? Proof that the harasser had had sex with men? Some of the worst male-on-female harassment I've seen involved men I am confident were virgins... so are they considered straight without a similar demand for "proof"?

Did the court demand proof that the harasser had had sex with men, or that he had never had sex with women? What was their definition of gay?

ridiculous!