Joel Bennett, whose client is one of two women that lodged written sexual harassment complaints against Cain during his three-year tenure leading the group, did not identify the woman. He said she felt "there is no value of revisiting the matter now or discussing it further publicly or privately. In fact, it is extremely painful to do so."I can see how the woman doesn't want to relive this. I got sexually harassed once, while working in the Senate, by a female secretary to a political appointee in the Bush administration. It was a bizarre incident. I had to call the woman to get a hold of of her boss, a deputy assistant secretary who handled the issues I worked on, so she knew me. One day I called to talk to him, he was on the phone, and asked her "do you mind if I hold" to talk to him. She responded, "that depends, what are you holding?" I remember at the time thinking, "did she just make a crude sexual joke?" So I told her, you know I've got work to do, just have him call me. Well, that's when things got really bizarre.
She called me back a few minutes later, I was working again and had let the incident go, and remember being surprised to hear her calling me - she never called me, her boss called me. I tried to play innocent, and ignore what she had said previously, figuring naively that this was a work call, and asked her something stupid like "what's up?" Which got me another sexual reference. And I might have said something about needing to get back to work, what did she want, and she responded, "I wanted to call and breathe heavy for you on the phone - are you ready?" then she did, 3 long heavy sexual breaths.
I froze.
It was bizarre. I couldn't speak. I couldn't hang up. I just sat there as this freak was breathing heavy to me on the phone. Finally, she finished breathing and then said, "did you like it?" I finally spoke up and said, simply, in a rather low voice, "stop it, HER NAME, stop it." She giggled and hung up.
I was blown away. It's odd, but it doesn't sound nearly as bad until it happens to you. I was simply blown away. My assistant was, I think, sitting next to me in my cubicle, she saw my face after I hung up and asked me "what's wrong?" I told her. And she said to me, "let me guess - you feel violated, and you feel like it's your fault." And she was right. All I could think of was why didn't I just hang up? Why did I let her go through three long and heavy slow breaths and THEN let her ask me how I liked it before I told her to stop? The simple answer is that I was so shocked I was frozen, while at the same time I literally couldn't believe what was happening. I kept trying to rationalize it in my head as something I was misunderstanding.
That's when I understood how benign sexual harassment can look, and how bad it really was. I felt totally violated, and I can't really tell you why, it was just far worse an experience in practice than it could ever read on paper. I called her boss, the DAS, and he thought it was funny. He actually laughed. I lost it. Told him I was calling the Assistant Secretary, and suddenly he sobered up. So I also got to experience guys blowing off the incident as a joke. And finally, I understood why women might not speak up right away, why they let it continue, and how it didn't necessarily mean that it didn't bother them.
So I get why the woman doesn't want to speak up. But the man is running for the president and he's the lead in the GOP polls. The lawyer of the woman allegedly harassed by Cain is right in saying that it would be extremely painful for his client to have this issue revisited. But he's flat out wrong when he says "there is no value of revisiting the matter now or discussing it further publicly." The man is running for president. If what he did is so bad that the woman still can't bear to have the details released 12 years later, then, sadly, the voters need to know the details. It doesn't have to be her explaining it publicly. But the details need to be made public so long as Herman Cain is running for president, and especially since he's leading the GOP pack.
