Letterman

I see in the news today that Letterman maintains a secret bedroom above the Ed Sullivan studio where he only takes young female staffers. I also see that the somewhat odd radio jock Don Imus has called Letterman a philanderer and “an angry, mean-spirited jerk."

Let me paint a little story. An extremely powerful and wealthy CEO hires a young attractive female “intern” who could easily be his daughter or even his granddaughter. Her job is clearly temporary. But if she pleases him, he has the ability to offer her a great full time job and greatly enhance her future career prospects.

He asks her to go to a movie. She turns him down by saying, “I see the way that you look at me. You are old enough to be my grandfather. You seem a little weird and creepy to me.” She does not get offered a full time job at the end of her internship. Or she does agree to date him, and she ends up getting a full-time, high paying job. Are these examples of sexual harassment? Of course they are.

Talk about abuse of power and using his position in the workplace to gain access to sexual favors from his female employees. If Letterman has multiple sexual affairs and is unfaithful with women who do not work -FOR- him, then that is his business. But when a supervisor has sex with his female employees it is almost always an indicator of sexual harassment.

This sort of shameful behavior is normally associated with powerful men, only occasionally with powerful women. In our Garland family bible we see documentation that during the slavery era some of the Garland white males were intentionally "bred" to some of the black slave women. The upper classes used to be able to get away with shameful behavior like this back during serfdom too.

It distresses me that I am not reading more comments criticizing the rich and powerful male supervisors who are still doing these sorts of things to women in the workplace. I thought we put an end to this sort of stuff 20 or 30 years ago.
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