In United States labor law, a hostile work environment exists when one's behavior within a workplace creates an environment that is difficult or uncomfortable for another person to work in, due to illegal discrimination. However, a working environment that is unpleasant and frightening for the victim due to sexual advances that have been denied by the victim, is what constitutes hostile work environment sexual harassment. Common complaints in sexual harassment lawsuits include fondling, suggestive remarks, sexually-suggestive photos displayed in the workplace, use of sexual language, or off-color jokes. Small matters, annoyances, and isolated incidents are usually not considered to be statutory violations of the discrimination laws. For a violation to impose liability, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to a reasonable person. An employer can be held liable for failing to prevent these workplace conditions, unless it can prove that it attempted to prevent the harassment and that the employee failed to take advantage of existing harassment counter-measures or tools provided by the employer.
Sexual harassment is a type of harassment involving the use of explicit or implicit sexual overtones, including the unwelcome and inappropriate promises of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. Sexual harassment can be physical and/or a demand or request for sexual favors, making sexually colored remarks, showing pornography, and any other unwelcome physical, verbal, or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment includes a range of actions from verbal transgressions to sexual abuse or assault. Harassment can occur in many different social settings such as the workplace, the home, school, or religious institutions. Harassers or victims can be of any gender.
Andrew Mark Cuomo is an American politician, lawyer, and former government official who served as the 56th governor of New York from 2011 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party and son of former governor Mario Cuomo, Cuomo previously served as the attorney general of New York from 2007 to 2010.
The National Women's Law Center (NWLC) is a United States non-profit organization founded by Marcia Greenberger in 1972 and based in Washington, D.C. The Center advocates for women's rights and LGBTQ rights through litigation, policy, and culture change initiatives. It began when female administrative staff and law students at the Center for Law and Social Policy demanded that their pay be improved, that the center hire female lawyers, that they no longer be expected to serve coffee, and that the center create a women's program.
Wayne Pacelle is an American animal rights and animal welfare activist, non-profit businessperson and author. Two of his books have been New York Times best-sellers.
Jodi Kantor is an American journalist. She is a New York Times correspondent whose work has covered the workplace, technology, and gender. She has been the paper's Arts & Leisure editor and covered two presidential campaigns, chronicling the transformation of Barack and Michelle Obama into the President and First Lady of the United States. Kantor was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her reporting on sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
Equal Rights Advocates (ERA) is an American non-profit gender justice/women's rights organization that was founded in 1974. ERA is a legal and advocacy organization for advancing rights and opportunities for women, girls, and people of marginalized gender identities through legal cases and policy advocacy.
Valerie June Jarrett is an American businesswoman and former government official serving as the chief executive officer of the Obama Foundation since 2021. She was the longest-serving senior advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama. She was assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, overseeing the office of the same name, and chaired the White House Council on Women and Girls. Before that, she was the chief executive officer of The Habitat Company and served as a co-chair of the Obama–Biden Transition Project.
Christina M. "Tina" Tchen is an American lawyer and a former official in the President Barack Obama Administration. She was CEO of Time's Up from 2019 to 2021, when she resigned following allegations that she provided legal aid to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo when sexual harassment allegations were made public. Her work centers on issues related to gender inequity, sexual harassment, and lack of diversity in the workplace.
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness. In the legal sense, these are behaviors that appear to be disturbing, upsetting or threatening. Traditional forms evolve from discriminatory grounds, and have an effect of nullifying a person's rights or impairing a person from benefiting from their rights. When these behaviors become repetitive, it is defined as bullying. The continuity or repetitiveness and the aspect of distressing, alarming or threatening may distinguish it from insult.
Roberta Ann Kaplan, also known as Robbie Kaplan, is an American lawyer focusing on commercial litigation and public interest matters. Kaplan successfully argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of LGBT rights activist Edith Windsor, in United States v. Windsor, a landmark decision that invalidated a section of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages. She was a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison before starting her own firm in 2017. In 2018, she co-founded the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund.
#MeToo is a social movement and awareness campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke. The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem. "Me Too" is meant to empower those who have been sexually assaulted through empathy, solidarity and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.
Time's Up was a non-profit organization that raised money to support victims of sexual harassment. The organization was founded on January 1, 2018, by Hollywood celebrities in response to the Weinstein effect and the Me Too movement. As of January 2020, the organization had raised $24 million in donations.
Debra S. Katz is an American civil rights and employment lawyer and a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin in Washington, D.C. She is best known for representing alleged victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment, notably Christine Blasey Ford, Charlotte Bennett, Vanessa Tyson, Chloe Caras, and accusers of Congressmen Pat Meehan and Eric Massa, and whistleblowers facing retaliation, including most recently Dr. Rick Bright. Katz's primary practice areas at her firm are employment and whistleblower law, where she represents victims of workplace discrimination and retaliation.
Megan Twohey is an American journalist with The New York Times. She has written investigative reports for Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Twohey's investigative reports have exposed exploitative doctors, revealed untested rape kits, and uncovered a secret underground network of abandoned unwanted adopted children. Her investigative reports have led to criminal convictions and helped prompt new laws aimed at protecting vulnerable people and children.
Douglas Holden Wigdor is a founding partner of the law firm Wigdor LLP, and works as a litigator in New York City, specializing in anti-discrimination law. Wigdor is best known for representing seven victims of alleged sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, the hotel maid in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case, over twenty employees at Fox News in sexual harassment and discrimination cases, and NFL coaches Brian Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton in a 2022 class action lawsuit against the National Football League alleging racist and discriminatory practices against Black coaches.
Alphonso David is an American lawyer, LGBT civil rights activist, former president of the Human Rights Campaign, and current president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. In August 2019, he became the president of the Human Rights Campaign. He was the first civil rights lawyer and first person of color to serve as president of the organization, but was fired from his role as president on September 6, 2021 after it was revealed that he advised former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo when he was accused of sexually assaulting women. He made national headlines in 2022 for bringing litigation against the Human Rights Campaign alleging racial bias in his firing. On March 15, 2023, the Human Rights Campaign said it had settled the lawsuit and stated that the terms of the settlement were confidential.
Andrew Cuomo, the 56th governor of New York, was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women starting in December 2020, with the accusations covering a range of alleged behavior. He denied all allegations and has apologized for his comments being interpreted as sexually charged. On February 28, 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that she would hire and deputize a law firm to conduct an independent investigation into the allegations. On March 11, the New York State Assembly authorized an impeachment investigation into the allegations. In August 2021, James released an investigatory report that stated that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women during his time in office, with actions such as unwanted groping, kissing and sexual comments. The controversy surrounding these allegations culminated in Governor Cuomo's resignation from office. Cuomo was replaced by his Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hochul.
Melissa DeRosa is an American former government official. She served as Secretary to the former Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, from 2017 until 2021. In 2023, she released a memoir titled What’s Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics & Crisis.
Nadine Taub was an American lawyer who laid the essential groundwork for women's rights in the workplace, including defending and winning the first sexual harassment case in the US in 1977. Taub played a pivotal, but largely unrecognized, role in the development of sexual harassment law in the United States. As part of a group of young female lawyers in the 1970s, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, Taub made legal history by winning cases which argued that the Constitution protected women's rights.
