Fatal attraction

The fall from glory was hard and swift.

On May 14, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was at the top of the world. With the enormous resources of the IMF behind him, he could make or break financially distressed countries.

Two days later, he sat in a filthy jail and faced charges of sexual assault of a 38-year-old hotel cleaning lady.

In the wake of this embarrassing incident, he quit his post. Unless something dramatic happens in his favor later, he can kiss goodbye his ambition to be president of France.

As in many sex-related scandals in the past involving prominent personalities, reports of previous dalliances of Strauss-Kahn became public.

In 2008, he was investigated for his affair with a junior colleague. Although the relationship was found to be consensual, the woman described him as “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.”

The subliminal message of her statement was, Strauss-Kahn is a person who cannot keep his zipper pants up or from looking at women subordinates as sex objects.

Schedule

Consensual or forced? That’s the question often asked whenever complaints of sexual molestation or harassment are filed by women against their male superiors or colleagues.

Come to think of it, the amount of time an executive actively and directly interacts with his secretary (and for that matter, other employees in relation to their immediate office colleagues) is more than the time he spends with his wife.

During a seven-hour sleep, husband and wife may be together but they’re not talking. Breakfast is less than an hour, if at all; the same thing goes for dinner, which becomes shorter or zero if either spouse works overtime, has outside engagements or wants to watch a favorite TV show.

The two- or three-hour commute to and from work further shortens the time they spend together. And if there are professional and social activities to attend to after office hours (or during weekends), the periods of physical contact become lesser.

Meanwhile, at the office, during the eight-hour or so work stretch, the executives, their secretaries and the rest of the staff—all properly groomed, well scented and trying hard to be in their best elements—physically and mentally interact with each other.

The collaborative action becomes warmer if they do overtime work or go out of town as part of their duties and responsibilities.

Attraction

The regular interaction in close quarters often gives rise to more than friendly working relationships which, over time, ripen into romantic ties, especially if the parties are unattached or unable to play the dating field due to work pressure.

If two single and consenting adults are involved in a relationship, no problem. The most that management can do in that situation is give them separate assignments to avoid their extended ties from getting in the way of their responsibilities.

The emotional entanglement becomes problematic if any of the parties is married, or one of them is superior in rank or exercises supervisory authority over the other.

Regardless of the positions held by the concerned parties, consent is not an acceptable defense for a married person embroiled in a liaison. That’s adultery, plain and simple.

Employee morale could be adversely affected if management is perceived to be tolerant of adulterous acts by its staff, regardless of their rank.

In “boss-subordinate” romances, assuming both parties are single, the affair would not raise eyebrows if it’s discreetly conducted and the lower-ranked employee does not develop superior airs.

Consequences

While the relationship is sweet and honey, fine. It’s when things turn sour that the higher-ranked employee and the company may find themselves in trouble.

A female subordinate who feels aggrieved by the end of the romance would fit Shakespeare’s statement that “hell hath no equal to a woman scorned.”

Depending on the severity of her hurt, she may file a criminal complaint for sexual harassment or seek disciplinary action against her former lover for violation of the company’s ethical rules, if any, for their erstwhile relationship.

If the boss thinks he was able to keep their liaison under wraps, expect him to deny the romance. Failing in that, he may invoke the “consenting adults” defense.

Against that claim, the woman can raise the argument that her ex-boyfriend used his superior position or moral ascendancy over her, with special work privileges given on the side, to lure her into the relationship.

Although proof will have to be presented to prove each other’s claims, the whole thing would be a case of “she said, he said” and, judging from the way our courts have treated similar situations in the past, male credibility often finds itself at the losing end.

Local firms, especially those with iconic names, are averse to bad publicity arising from sexual harassment complaints within their ranks, more so if they involve their executives. No effort is spared in preventing news about such cases from attracting media attention and become fodder for nasty comments by columnists.

In the few sexual harassment complaints in the local scene, at least those that were talked about in the corporate grapevine, it’s the higher-ranked employee who usually quits toavoid further embarrassment to the company. It helps that a hefty retirement or separation pay accompanies that “sacrifice.”

Moral of the story? Don’t dip your pen in the company ink. It might stain you.

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