the trial page 2

although this story is, on the surface of things anyway, about a sexual harassment lawsuit, it has many chambers. It's not "my" story -- it is an elephant that hundreds of people would describe in hundreds of ways. It has, to me, the texture of nightmare, in that it is filled with scary, illogical events I would never expect to happen, patterns of thought and, more important, morality, I can't follow. It is a story about what happens when the oppressed becomes the oppressor. It's a very depressing story, ultimately, about America, because it combines the worst elements of Puritanism with the worst elements of capitalism. It's about a sexual harassment lawsuit that ripped through a magazine, Spin, and left dozens of people's private lives ransacked, scrutinized and judged. In this case, it was not only "transgressions" that were seized upon, but every last instance of sexuality expressed, even consensual. In fact, especially consensual. I suppose I could start by saying: "I had a relationship with my boss many years ago, and boy did I get my butt kicked." But that's only a small part of the epic. Besides, "relationship" needs definition. And so does "boss." All these words are very, as my friend Daisy would say, "un-beautiful" -- designed to exclude all the uniqueness and nuance of real life. Consider the difference between "sexual relationship" -- the term that came almost hissing off the lips of the plaintiff's attorneys -- and "love," a word that was never, in three years, mentioned. Not to harp on Orwell, but in his novel "1984" he did describe a society in which romantic love was forbidden, where helicopters hovered outside bedroom windows and people were relentlessly persecuted and punished for expressing not subversive politics but intimacy. If you know the story at all, you probably know this: Former Spin research editor Staci Bonner filed suit against Spin publisher Bob Guccione Jr. Much to everybody's surprise, he refused to settle, and the case went to court this past spring. Sixty-six pages, 311 paragraphs long, the suit, filed in 1994, charged Spin (Camouflage Associates) and its then owner, Robert Guccione Jr. (the magazine was recently sold to the publishers of VIBE magazine), with sexual harassment, sexual favoritism, sex discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress and unequal pay. The logic went something like this: The reason the plaintiff was never promoted to a "creative" position (although she did write 42 pieces that appeared in Spin during her three years of employment) was not only because of a "harassive environment," but also because of a pervasive and insidious form of sexual discrimination. In order to prove this supposed discrimination, they had to establish systemic injustice. They came out with blazing guns, claiming that the only way women "got ahead" at Spin was by sleeping with the editors. Or, failing that, by laughing at their jokes. Or by simply being a member of the privileged class, which the plaintiff defined as "tall, thin blondes." (Although Staci herself is pretty, blond and fairly tall.) Much of the suit was a protracted battle over the extremely tenuous issue of "talent." The Catch-22, though, was that once you became identified as one of these scarlet women who'd slept with the editors, there was no such thing as proving yourself, because everything you'd ever achieved was now filtered through the lens of "opportunities" granted due to sexual complicity. The more you tried to use your accomplishments to prove your worth, the more you dug your own grave, for it was precisely those accomplishments that you were being hanged for. And no amount of discourse on the complex nature of cause and effect would deter this angry mob. "God," remarked one scholarly girlfriend of mine disgustedly, "they're so Newtonian." In effect, the suit sorted women into two categories: "good" and "bad." It defended the "good" women, i.e., those who had perceived all sexual invitations or comments as "hostile," and it attacked, with startling savagery, the "bad" women -- those who had documentable inter-office flings or even flirtations. The paradigm that took shape was almost Marxist in form, but rather than capital being the thing that explained everything, to these feminists it was sex. No, not sex, something much more abstract -- sexual chemistry. Whose lunatic idea it was I don't know, but they actually set out to explain every last byline, promotion and even desk placement at a struggling rock magazine according to the sexual dynamics of the workplace. Apart from the standard-fare props of "sexual harassment" (a few copies of Playboy, a cactus, a string of lurid expletives, "inappropriate" late-night phone calls and the like), the suit was designed to target, and expose as pernicious and unfair, this workplace chemistry. (The term "workplace" distorts the fact that this was a creative, not a corporate, entity.) Messy realities -- the smoky brew of each person's sense of self, sexuality, confidence, mood, childhood, you name it -- were ignored in favor of sharp, clear lines connecting the dots. The maddening thing about the suit was that there was no real smoking gun. Instead it piled up a mountain of minor offenses, rude behaviors and alleged expletives, finally relying on a "pattern" of sexual favoritism and discrimination only discernible to those who shared the political convictions of the plaintiff or who once worked at Spin and harbored some calcified grievance against Guccione. The murky hypothesis of sexual favoritism preceded any clear evidence to support it (and indeed, an impartial jury that sat through almost four weeks of testimony failed to detect any such favoritism or, for that matter, any sexual harassment to speak of). In order to prove that the women who were "sexually complicit" in the workplace were rewarded, every sexual connection had first to be unearthed, later to be traced along the lines of "career advancement" at Spin. I had been, for almost 10 years, on and off, editor and writer of Spin's monthly AIDS column, and I had been, for a few years, involved in a serious relationship with my employer, friend and mentor, Bob Guccione Jr. I was the bull's-eye on the dartboard -- the perfect example of someone who had benefited from this pervasive injustice.

A vicious, efficient blow