Lawyer Loses Case on Sex Poems? We Are Back in Business!

Whew – a somber day followed by a day of dead air – we’re lucky anyone’s still out there. Are you still out there?

Well, we hope so, because CE is returning to its bread and butter today, starting with a cautionary tale coming out of the 1^st Circuit that we had to ignore on Monday.

We’ll spoil it for you: if you’re going to write love notes to coworkers, don’t sue when you get fired.

Until now, we’ve always assumed British guys in their 60′s living in the states could do pretty much whatever they wanted. (Girls go crazy for that accent. It’s ridiculous.) Apparently, so did David Bennett. The ex-pat IP lawyer was fired from a corporation in Massachusetts, and he sued for age discrimination, among other things.

The problem was, he was fired for allegedly penning a series of anonymous, sexually-tinged love poems to a coworker. Though he denied writing the poems, he was ultimately implicated because many of the spellings and words were in the King’s English, and not our west-of-the-atlantic, bastardized hog-talk. We can only assume this was a way of invoking the bright line rule about girls and accents espoused above. Plus, they hired a handwriting expert, which is an area of science we honestly thought was made up for 80′s cop shows and CSI.

The other (read: actual) important thing to remember from the case is that, in the end, it didn’t matter whether Bennett wrote the poems or not. From the ABA Journal:

Whether or not Bennett actually was the author was “largely beside the point,” the panel wrote. “(W)hat counts is whether the decision-maker … believed the plaintiff to be the author and, if so, whether he acted on that belief in deciding to send the plaintiff packing.”

One last thing – when they asked Bennett if he wrote the poems he denied it, and then he said he had never composed a poem in his life. A search of Bennett’s desk revealed a whole collection of other poems in his handwriting. Remind you of anyone? We’ll simply repeat our often-repeated plea: Before you file that lawsuit that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to fully resolve, THINK ABOUT HOW DIRTY YOUR OWN FRIGGING LAUNDRY IS!

Or don’t. This stuff is a boon for us.

Job Bored – 11/1

• And you thought those models were going hungry by choice… – MarketWatch.
• If his boss hadn’t put him on the feminine hormones he could’ve avoided the cross-dressing and that gay affair. Kind of gives new meaning to “on the basis of sex”. – The Guardian.
• Atty General: “I’m resigning not because I’m a quitter.” No, you’re resigning because you owe $3.7 million to the employees you arbitrarily replaced on racial grounds, lost witnesses and dismissed the 2 biggest cases on the docket, then housed an armed robbery suspect in your house. Only in New Orleans. – L.A. Times

Recent Settlements:

• B&H Video in New York: $4.3 Million – Gothamist
• Chevron: $5.5 Million – San Jose Mercury News
• Morgan Stanley: $46 Mil. And no, we’re not missing a decimal point. – Investment News

“THE PRICE IS WRONG????”

We all remember the opening….the late great Rod Roddy, in his sequence suits (I want to know where I can get one of those things) would yell out a contestants name…..”Joe Blow, c’mon down, you’re the next contestant on The Price is Right”….and like mad the contestant would run front and center to “contestants row” to play crazy games for huge prizes.

Of course the man overseeing all of this action is one of the greatest actors of all time – Bob Barker. (That’s right I said actors. And Bob Barker. Ever seen Happy Gilmore? The price is wrong, B***H.) For millions of us, staying home sick from school meant we got to watch The Price Is Right. No matter what ailed you, TPIR always made you feel better, and if you are like I am, you genuinely liked Bob Barker, almost like a grandpa.

Deborah Curling, however, is not like you and me. She is a former employee of the Price is Right who recently filed a lawsuit against Bob Barker and other producers claiming, among other things, that she was sexually harassed over an extended period of time.

Curling claims that because she testified on behalf of another employee who was suing TPIR, that Barker and the other producers sexually harassed her and created a hostile work environment. This is not the first time the 83 year Barker has been sued. There have been several former employees, many of them the models that display the products and prizes, that have sued Barker, alleging sexual harassment. Many of those cases were settled out of court. Curling cited those cases in her complaint.

We here at Current Employment take this kind of thing very seriously, and will continue to follow the developments in this case. At time of press, CBS had no comment regarding the lawsuit.

For more info on this story click here for a link http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071005/us_nm/barker_lawsuit_dc_2