The Changing Face of Sexual Harrassment

By Justin Clark, Nerve.com. Posted September 30, 2005.

In the late spring of 1999, twenty-nine-year-old Julie Overmyer, a svelte, cheerful former art student and recent Los Angeles transplant, was offered a job as personal assistant to the head of a new clothing company. The position came with some surprises.

"I used to go over to his house to take dictation, and he'd answer the door in his tighty-whities," recalls Overmyer of her boss, Dov Charney, the iconoclastic founder of American Apparel. "He'd make small talk when I got there, asking me about my boyfriend, or do I think guys in L.A. are hot, and what are my sexual experiences. Then it was on to business."  

At American Apparel, that transition wasn't difficult, she says. Though hired as a personal assistant, Overmyer was asked and agreed to model the company's tank tops and skirts. The company's ads feature scantily clad models, many of them company employees, shot in a voyeuristic amateur style viewed by some as refreshing and others as gratuitious. But as any vaguely metropolitan fashion consumer knows, American Apparel doesn't toe the established corporate line. The company has smirked at the models of both labor and business, paying a living wage but discouraging its employees from unionizing.     

But it's Charney's alleged personal actions, not his racy ads or $250 million in annual sales, that has created trouble for American Apparel. Since the beginning of the summer, the company has found itself embroiled in several well-publicized sexual harassment suits brought by former American Apparel workers and contractors who allege they were exposed to crude language, asked to hire employees Charney was attracted to, and in one case given a sex toy. Overmyer quit American Apparel after four months, but she has not joined the lawsuits. In fact, she stresses that Charney's "eccentric behavior," as she calls it, had nothing to do with her resignation. "I quit because I didn't appreciate the way he handled business," says Overmyer. "If you were a vendor, he had no qualms about calling you a fuck-up."     

But it's Charney who has been painted as the fuck-up in dozens of articles and blog posts. The most famous account was supplied by a Jane magazine reporter, who claimed that Charney masturbated in her presence eight times. Articles followed in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Business Week.     

The reasons for the attention may be worth pondering. Countless public figures have been accused of sexual harassment since the world learned that the semen-like stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress was, in fact, semen. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 gubernatorial campaign was dogged with numerous accusations of unsolicited groping. Last month, Australia's Labor Party leader John Brogden attempted suicide after he admitted to fondling a reporter while drunk.     

Still, Dov Charney is a relatively unknown figure, and Overmyer says she is surprised by the extent of the public's interest. She suggests it's not Charney's specific actions but his company's sexually brazen culture that's on trial. In many ways, Overmyer may be right: fifteen years after Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas insinuated sexual harassment into the popular consciousness, a new wave of court decisions, legislation and business practices is renewing the debate.    

Is Dov Charney the tighty-whitied Rosa Parks of those who seek to desegregate business and pleasure? How far will new restrictions against sexual expression at work reach? Is there still room for nookie -- or even talking about it -- at the office? Two lawsuits coming down the pike may answer those questions, and both directly impact the American Apparel case. The first was brought against Warner Brothers by a typist who claimed to have been offended by crude language and behavior in the writer's room of the show Friends. A decision in favor of the studio was overturned on appeal, and the case is now headed for the California Supreme Court.

According to Adam Levin, defense lawyer for both the Warner Brothers and American Apparel suits, these issues aren't necessarily just about randy employees soliciting sex from the uninterested. While sexual harassment claims originally centered around "quid pro quo harassment" -- either you sleep with me or you don't get the promotion, or even lose your job -- Levin says such claims have increasingly advanced into the realm of "hostile environments," in which crude or racy language, even that which is overheard and not directly targeted at the alleged victim, can constitute harassment. Levin says in the second case, the court should impose stricter limits on liability in the "communicative workplace" -- creative environments that might be hampered by restrictions on potentially embarrassing or offensive speech.    

Justin Clark has written for L.A. Weekly, Psychology Today and Black Book.

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