Someone on my Twitter feed displayed the table of data that was released. It has year by year totals and the number of settlements. The number floats around, eyeballing it I’d say usually $500K per year and around 10 complaints. But 2007 was a banner year with 25 settlements for a total over $4 million.
I know they aren’t all harassment claims, but this is our money and our elected officials behaving badly somehow. We should have the details, and not have to dig to get them.
I wonder if there are NDAs with these payouts. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Come on. Do you imagine that the male majority can’t retaliate against a woman who speaks up? They can, and they would.
The way to combat this is for a large group of women in Congress to all name the harassers at the same time, and call out retaliation. One woman can’t do it by herself.
It’s going to look partisan, though. I do not believe that Democratic men are more or less likely to be harassers than Republican men. The risk factor is not party, but maleness. However, more than 3/5ths of men in Congress are Republicans. So if Congressional harassers are called out, there will be a lot more Republicans than Democrats called out even if Democrats are just as bad. And then people will say it’s about party.
I’m going to repeat #25, but this time with the true quote I’m responding to (and I’d love to see #25 deleted because it doesn’t make sense as posted):
Come on. Do you imagine that the male majority can’t retaliate against a woman who speaks up? They can, and they would.
The way to combat this is for a large group of women in Congress to all name the harassers at the same time, and call out retaliation. One woman can’t do it by herself.
It’s going to look partisan, though. I do not believe that Democratic men are more or less likely to be harassers than Republican men. The risk factor is not party, but maleness. However, more than 3/5ths of men in Congress are Republicans. So if Congressional harassers are called out, there will be a lot more Republicans than Democrats called out even if Democrats are just as bad. And then people will say it’s about party.
23 was the answer to your question, rom, and #25 was a screwed-up response to a different question. People have to respond to subpoenas, even if they have an NDA. No court is going to penalize them for doing it.
And that’s why I believe they virtually all do it. No, I know, they don’t all do it, but enough of them do it that it’s reasonable to assume that any man you’re working with might do it. It’s not a rare event, by any means.
@partyof5 – I used to live in GA. Worth County is in SW Georgia and heavily rural (peanut farming is big here and it;s less than an hour from Americus, where Jimmy Carter lived (still lives?). 175 miles and far, far from Atlanta. Here are a couple of articles written since after the incident that go into more detail about what these kids were subjected to. Every child in the school was searched. No drugs were found. The settlement comes out to an average to $3333 per student (range is $1 to $6000, depending on the severity of the assault). Legal fees are provided for outside the students’ settlement amount. Noone is getting rich off of this.
Who else has a Please, Not Him list? Please, not George Clooney. Please, not Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias at Vox. Please, not Paul Krugman. Please, not my bike buddies. Please, not my friend who was accused of abuse and we didn’t believe it. Please, not my brothers or my nephews or my nephews-in-law.
NotAllMen? Yeah, seems like a depressingly big proportion of men though.