The allegations against Anthony Gutierrez, a top aide to Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann are severe. Once again, I’m finding myself really rethinking the whole model of sexual harassment, because it seems to me that “quid pro quo” sexual harassment should be some degree of rape. If you threaten someone into having sex with you, that’s rape by any reasonable measure, so why isn’t it considered rape if you hold someone’s livelihood over their head? And that’s the nature of one of the allegations, coming from two separate women.
Both women said Gutierrez pressured them with sexual propositions, saying, “you owe me,” the newspaper reported.
The other allegation is potentially even worse.
The woman reported seeing Dann and his scheduler, Jessica Utovich, who was wearing pajamas and lying on the floor with a laptop. The woman said she felt intoxicated and Gutierrez encouraged her to lie on his bed, the report said.
She said she later awoke to find three buttons on her pants undone and Gutierrez beside her wearing only underwear.
These allegations are serious criminal matters, not some trashy sex scandal. But look what the Dayton Daily News is running with as a headline.
I suppose what makes this objectionable is only obvious to advanced patriarchy-blamers, but to us, it’s shockingly obvious what’s going on. Once again, you have the media folding sex crimes into the category of tawdry gossip, which demeans the seriousness of sexual assault and makes it seem like just another flavor of naughtiness. It’s not what she was wearing that is relevant here, but the fact that he was attempting to get it off her body while she was passed out. Clown suit, pajamas, who gives a shit?
19 Responses to “Sexual assault is not a pajama party”
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The quote struck me as something someone says when he’s denying that the woman is his mistress… and the media is eating that spin right up with that headline. mistress = consentual relationship, and in political circles, quite surviveable on the scandal-o-meter.
Rape… not so much.
It makes me sick to my stomache to read these things from people placed in positions of extreme power and trust. How do they live with themselves? (I’m betting from the quoted headline that the answer is ‘by lying to themselves about what is really going on’, which just makes me sadder)
Well, there goes the House Party II defense.
However, the characterization of the article is a little unfair, in that the person against who the complaint is leveled is not Dann, but his assistant Gutierrez (the original story is here in the Dayton News). The pajamaes thing comes from the fact that they’re next door neighbors and one of the complainants asserts that Dann personally witnessed the harrasment (evidently while she was in pajamas), but did nothing to prevent it.
So, in essence, this is the follow-up story, as to whether the AG of the state of Ohio covered up quid pro quo sexual harrasment and/or had an inappropriate relationship with his scheduler, who apparently did not file any complaint.
And, if my in-moderation comment appears confusing, here’s the shortened follow-up: Dann (who is not accused of sexual harassment) was fingered in the complaint against another person (Gutierrez) as lounging about his place with his scheduler (who, pajama-less or not, did not file a complaint) which he is denying.
As clear as an azure sky in deepest summer.
Ack, you’re right, I’ll fix.
The woman said she felt intoxicated and Gutierrez encouraged her to lie on his bed
I’d be willing to bet she got roofied. Although it may sound far-fetched, if you see a woman of your acquaintance suddenly seem really intoxicated, you should take her to an emergency room to be tested for date-rape drugs.
And agreed that the story is not that bad, but the headline, which is what half the audience is going to read to the exclusion of anything else, is ridiculous.
I agree to an extent, Gutierrez must be thrilled beyond belief that this got front page treatment, while the serious allegations against him got… well, I don’t know. Any Daytonians know if the story I linked above was on the front page?
However, to the extent that spying the scheduler in Dann’s house with pajamas (i.e. in unprofessional attire suggesting an inappropriate relationship) was the sole line in the complaint that was used to bring Dann into Gutierrez’s universe of harassment, I don’t know how else he was supposed to deny it. From there, the headline seems to be an inevitability.
Oh agreed that it was inevitable. It’s so silly.
If he slipped her a roofie that is rape. Not just morally — legally. Unfortunately, it may not be so easy to prove.
And FWIW, the copy and the headline are written by two entirely different individuals or groups of individuals.
Godmonkey (and everyone else who trots this out): SO WHAT?
I’ve worked in publishing and advertising for years, in many cases that’s not even true and even if the responsible party does work for a huge corporate machine where it is true, that is no excuse for bullshit headlines. Catchy is good, but misleading and misogynist is just shoddy, ass-tastic writing no matter who does it — writer or editor.
Would some variety of felony extortion law apply? That would make sense to me.
I think you mixed up the story a little bit.
Two women filed complaints against Gutierrez but Jessica Utovich was not one of them.
One of the complaints mentioned that Utovich was in Marc Dann’s apartment in her pajamas- something that may turn out to be a scandal in and of itself but is completely unrelated to the sexual assualt cases.
On a tangent - drugging anyone with any drug for any reason without their knowledge should be considered assault with a deadly weapon unless it’s done by a doctor in accordance with the Hippocratic oath (e.g. to an unconscious trauma victim).
“…it seems to me that “quid pro quo” sexual harassment should be some degree of rape.”
I very much agree.
I don’t remember the thread exactly (it was one of the really long ones at Alas), but I’ve thought this ever since I got into an argument with a pseudo-ally about sexual harassment and his comment that “of course the right thing to do would be to say no [to his coercion].”
The comment felt wrong to me from the start. As I thought about why I realized that if the only logical response is for the harassee to not give in the harassment, then why would harassment be criminal in the first place? The whole reason why it is criminal is because there is no “of course” about her saying no.
The whole point of the harassment is to put her in a position where she can’t say no. At least not without consequences that are arguably worse than saying “yes.” Which makes the “yes” a coerced “yes” and therefore any sexual contact that results is rape.
It was at this point that I realized that in reality, such rapists are actually even less likely to get convicted of even just the harassment (after all, how can it be harassment if she said yes?) and I had one of those moments where you just want to be a hermit for a decade or two.
Also, what togolosh said.
it seems to me that “quid pro quo” sexual harassment should be some degree of rape
I don’t disagree, with you or Mickel above, but the devil is in the details. “Some degree of rape” seems to describe all hetero sex under MacKinnon’s model, which always struck me as pretty valid. But it’s not something you can build a coherent legal regime on without radically restructuring legal attitudes toward almost every other social relation as well.
The problem is that if we started treating economic coercion the same as, say, physical coercion under the law, every employer in existence would be a felon many times over. They’d be on the hook for kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, conversion, enslavement, and in many cases battery. Landlords would be on the hook for robbery.
Sexual harassment in the US is not illegal because it is coercive or abusive; it is illegal because it targets one gender and not another. I agree that this is bizarre, but it’s how the law operates. If we were to try to construct a legal regime that treated it as illegal coercion, it would be difficult not to extend that reasoning to other forms of economic coercion. Which might be nice, but it’s not going to happen in a nominally capitalist society.
(N.B., I realize that the story actually involves attempted sexual assault, not just sexual harassment. But I’m responding only to this one comment you made.)
Matt,
The simple solution to that would be to not treat it as exactly rape, but to instead create a category of extortion that involves sexual “favors” - as the press likes to call them. (Or a category of harassment that mimics extortion charges.)
At the moment, the problem isn’t just that someone who uses sexual harassment to blackmail or extort someone won’t be charged with any kind of rape, it’s also that the perpetrator is less likely to be convicted of the sexual harassment if the victim did the normal thing and gave into the harassment. While this has a lot to do with attitudes of juries, it also has to do with the fact that the legal system itself doesn’t even acknowledge the difference between sexual harassment that is done simply to do harm in and of itself and sexual harassment that is done with a specific goal in mind - other than running certain people out of the workplace anyway.
It’s not terribly realistic to ask juries to understand the very real harm done by quid pro quo harassment when the legal system doesn’t even fully acknowledge it.
Changing the charges to something more like extortion of blackmail allows for the distinction between attempted [rape/extortion] and [rape/extortion]. Maybe I’m putting to much trust in the American public, but I think even that small change would help a lot in getting people to think about qui pro quo harassment in terms of coercion and not in terms of “well she said yes, so what’s the problem?”
Sexual harassment and rape are not mutually exclusive. Unless I’m misreading badly here, the women filed a civil complaint for sexual harassment; that doesn’t prevent them from going to the police and trying to get criminal charges filed.
I think it’s worthwhile to call such acts rape even if they don’t quite fit some jurisdiction’s definition or otherwise aren’t prosecutable as such, in order to get across the idea that it’s *always* wrong to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.
I agree the pajama business sounds awful, and more clearly actionable. The tougher part that I picked up on was the quid pro quo “you owe me” business in your first quote.
One thing that did stand out for me once you mentioned it, is the insufficiency of the term “quid pro quo.” Because while it’s usually all jumbled together in, say, HR orientations and even the lecture in my women’s studies class last quarter, there’s really not *one thing* called quid pro quo. Instead there’s solicitation of compensated sex (have sex with me and you’ll get that promotion), and then there’s extortion (have sex with me or kiss your bonus goodbye.)
In non-business settings (say, down by the waterfront) both solicitation and extortion are considered straight-up crimes. So unless someone’s prepared to argue that crimes committed on the job are somehow ok the way, say, assault with a deadly weapon isn’t a crime if it happens on the ice at a hockey rink I don’t see why solicitation and extortion should be legal just because it happens at work.
figleaf