opinion

City must drop victim-shaming strategy with sexual harassment lawsuit: RGJ Editorial Board

While the rest of the country works to bring abuse victims out of the shadows, the City of Reno is moving backward, and taking its citizens with it.

The RGJ Editorial Board strongly disagrees with the city’s demand for a list of past consensual relationships from one of the plaintiffs in a sexual harassment lawsuit.

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Last week, the office of Reno City Attorney Karl Hall asked a former city employee to provide names of “all persons that you worked with whom you had a physical, romantic and/or sexual relationship since January 1, 2000” as part of the discovery process in a lawsuit against the city.

We acknowledge that attorneys might pursue tenuous, often morally ambiguous strategies if it offers a chance at courtroom victory for their clients.

But in this case, our attorney isn’t some hired outside counsel – he’s an elected official.

And we are the clients — the citizens and taxpayers of Reno.

Renoites need to ask themselves if they’re OK with this, and if they support the city leaders who back the strategy. As for the members of the RGJ Editorial Board, we believe this line of thinking is outdated and indefensible, and it reflects poorly on the city and on the voters.

We can’t fathom how Hall's office and the City of Reno believe a list of past consensual relationships could improve the city’s case in a harassment lawsuit — that is, except for the possibility that they can humiliate the plaintiff into dropping the case altogether, and possibly intimidate other past and future victims into silence. If it works, we can only presume that the city will respond to future sexual harassment lawsuits by asking what the victims were wearing, or why they were away from home after sundown.

In the abstract, city leadership has signaled that they want to help victims of sexual harassment. Earlier this month, Mayor Hillary Schieve proposed setting up a misconduct hotline that would allow city employees to report sexual harassment — seemingly a step in the right direction. But when confronted with concrete allegations in the form of a lawsuit, the city has regressed into a past era of puritanical victim-blaming.

The lawyer for the plaintiff has asked the city to withdraw the question about past relationships, saying it violates federal evidence rules. We think it violates basic morality as well.

Schieve has called for Hall to reconsider its approach, and the City Council will hold a meeting Friday to discuss other options for handling the case. We hope our elected officials come to their senses and drop this dubious — and highly unethical — legal strategy.

Editorials reflect the consensus of the Reno Gazette Journal editorial board and are written by one of its members. Ryan Kedzierski is the RGJ’s president. Kelly Ann Scott is the newspaper’s executive editor. Brett McGinness is the RGJ’s engagement editor. Community members include Enrique Carmona, Barbara Courtnay, Lee Herz Dixon and Sam Stynen. The editorial board operates separately from the newsroom. Its opinions do not affect news coverage.

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