Sexual Harassment in the United States. Mary Welek Atwell
is constructed with enough coerciveness, subtlety, suddenness, or one-sidedness to negate the effectiveness of the woman’s refusal, or as long as her refusals are simply ignored while her job is formally undisturbed, she is not considered to have been sexually harassed.”18 She has been. All of this added up to a ruling that a loss of tangible job benefits was not a requirement for a finding of sexual harassment but that activities that created a hostile work environment were equally prohibited under Title VII. These legal developments were critical to the D.C. Court of Appeals’ holding in Mechelle Vinson’s case and critical to the Supreme Court’s decision in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson.
On September 22, 1978, Mechelle Vinson filed a complaint in federal court against Sidney L. Taylor, her supervisor, and Capital City Savings and Loan Association (which later through mergers became Meritor Savings Bank). She alleged that Taylor had coerced her into engaging in sexual activities she did not want and that the bank knew of Taylor’s conduct but failed to stop him.19 Her claim was that she had been a victim of sexual harassment which was a form of discrimination based on sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is worth noting that Vinson’s case went to trial after Barnes had established that sexual harassment is a form of gender discrimination but before Bundy had dealt with the issue of hostile environment.
Even before the trial began, District Judge John Garrett Penn who heard the case issued two rulings that could negatively affect Vinson’s claim. He refused to allow the testimony of two other women who alleged that Taylor had also harassed them and he permitted testimony about Vinson’s style of dress and her conversations with her colleagues about sexual fantasies. Even with these limitations, she had a powerful case. As Vinson told her story, she was 19 years old and looking for a job when she ran into Sidney Taylor who managed a bank in her neighborhood. During their encounter on the street, Taylor suggested that Vinson stop by the bank and pick up an application. She did so, Taylor recommended her for a position, and she was hired as a teller-trainee on September 9, 1974. At first the manager was helpful—even fatherly—as he assisted her with learning the job and expressed a willingness to help her out financially. However, about nine months after Vinson was hired, Taylor took her to dinner and demanded that she go to bed with him. ←22 | 23→He claimed that she owed him for her job. He also indicated that he had the power to have her fired if she refused. Unwillingly, Vinson did have sex with Taylor and did so in answer to his demands over the next two years. She estimated that there were forty to fifty sexual encounters—in the bank vault, in the basement of the building—both during and after work hours. She also charged that on occasion he had forcibly raped her with such brutality that she was forced to seek medical attention. Other times he exposed himself to her and grabbed her breasts and buttocks, sometimes in the presence of other employees. In addition, he made lewd remarks to her within the hearing of others. All of this humiliating behavior ended only in 1977 when Vinson became involved with a steady boyfriend. She also claimed that Taylor had tampered with her employment records. In September 1978, Vinson told the bank she was taking an extended sick leave, brought about, she said, by the mental and physical toll of the harassment. In November of that year, the bank fired her. At about the same time, she submitted a letter of resignation. She had already filed her lawsuit against Taylor and the bank.20
Taylor denied all of Vinson’s charges against him, saying there had been no sexual relations, and claiming that Vinson had made advances toward him which he had rebuffed. He also argued that Vinson had refused to follow his instructions about training another teller and that she had ultimately been discharged for excessive absences. He wanted the court to believe that Vinson was simply being vindictive and seeking revenge against him because he refused her attentions and because he criticized her work ethic. The bank’s position was that even if the accusations against Taylor were true, it bore no liability because it did not know about or approve of the behavior. Additionally, the bank denied that Taylor had the authority to hire or fire employees, and asserted that his title of manager was only an honorific and not indicative of his actual power.
The trial lasted eleven days and at its conclusion Judge Penn dismissed all of Vinson’s claims. The trial court never determined the truth of the alleged misconduct but decided that if there had been a sexual relationship between Vinson and Taylor, “it was voluntary and had nothing to do with her continued employment at the bank and therefore [she] was not the victim of sexual harassment.”21 He further found that because the bank had not been aware of the allegations against Taylor, it could not be liable. After losing in the trial court, Vinson took her grievance to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, where it was heard in 1982 by a three-judge panel that included Judge Spottswood Robinson as well as Judge J. Skelly Wright.
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The Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s decision in Vinson v. Taylor, but the ruling was not handed down until three years later due both to Judge Robinson’s health and the overload of cases before the D.C. Circuit.22 Robinson stated that there were two types of sexual harassment claims: the quid pro quo variety as Paulette Barnes had experienced and the hostile environment type described in the Bundy case. Although the appellate court was required to defer to the lower court’s finding of fact (that if there was a sexual relationship it did not affect Vinson’s advancement or continued employment at the bank), Robinson was able to finesse the matter by referring to the ruling in Bundy. That opinion had held that a loss of tangible job benefits was not a requirement for a finding of sexual harassment, but that such a claim could be sustained if a hostile work environment existed. Thus Judge Robinson could find that the appropriate test in Vinson’s case was whether Taylor “created or condoned a substantially discriminatory work environment, regardless of whether the complaining employees lost any tangible job benefits as a result of the discrimination.”23 Secondly the Court of Appeals, citing the EEOC guidelines, held that the test of sexual harassment was not whether a person complied with demands for sex but whether the advances were unwelcome. This was a critical portion of the ruling as it changed the criterion for sexual harassment from one that focused on the victim (did she capitulate?) to one that focused on the harasser (did he put her in an intolerable position?)
In the lower court, Judge Penn had allowed testimony that Vinson’s style of dress and her personal fantasies were relevant to determining whether the sexual activity had been voluntary. Apparently in his view a woman whose skirts were short or whose necklines were plunging was signaling some sort of receptivity to her supervisor’s advances. The Court of Appeals thought otherwise. “Since under Bundy, a woman does not waive her Title VII rights by her sartorial or whimsical proclivities, that testimony has no part in this litigation.”24 Finally, on the question of employer liability, Judge Robinson found that Title VII was intended to hold employers strictly liable for discriminatory behavior by supervisory employees.
Rather than accepting the ruling of the three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals and settling with Mechelle Vinson, the bank decided to appeal to the entire judicial bench of the D.C. Circuit. The bank asked all the court’s judges, thirteen in all, to sit together (en banc) to hear its case. The judges refused by a vote of 10 to 3. Ironically the three judges who dissented were Judge Robert Bork (later a Reagan nominee to the Supreme Court rejected by the Senate for his very conservative views), Judge Antonin Scalia (nominated ←24 | 25→by Reagan to the Supreme Court, serving from 1986 to 2016), and Judge Kenneth Starr (later the special prosecutor who wrote the report to impeach President Bill Clinton).25 Apparently skeptical of the whole