For its bracing display of business- world vices, the implosion of W.R. Grace & Co. is hard to beat. For one thing, it has intimations of greed. J. Peter Grace, the ailing 81-year-old chairman, announced his resignation amid disclosures about hundreds of thousands of dollars in company money that had been paid for private security guards, nursing care and the upkeep of a $2 million Manhattan apartment. And of course it has a whiff of treachery. Behind the internal inquiry that led to the patriarch's undoing was chief executive officer J.P. Bolduc, 55, the very person Grace had groomed to succeed him. And naturally there's a hint of deceit. When Bolduc suddenly quit last month, the board of directors said it was because of "differences of style and philosophy." But as it later emerged, Bolduc was forced out in part because of an alleged history of sexual harassment. There it was-sex. Now the story has everything.
Everything but details. None of the five women employees who made the claims, which Bolduc resolutely denies, had ever filed a formal complaint with the company, which has procedures for reporting sexual harassment. Instead, the five told their stories to Harold Tyler, a retired federal judge whose law firm was hired by the Grace board to examine the separate issue of whether the chairman's perks should have been disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the midst of that inquiry, Tyler was diverted by reports that Bolduc, who is married and has four children, had a reputation for crude behavior and lewd come-ons with female colleagues.
Last week two of the five women also spoke to TIME. Both insisted on remaining anonymous for fear, they said, that by coming forward they would damage their career prospects and be stigmatized as troublemakers. (One remarked, "The good-ole-boy world is still the good-ole-boy world.") And though they work in separate parts of the operation and do not know each other, they both drew a picture of Bolduc as an executive lech, fond of sticking his tongue in the ears of startled women or slipping a hand up their dresses-all in the name of unbuckled fun.
One of the women, a manager, says she had her first experience with Bolduc's more than collegial style in an elevator. "He paid me a compliment, then reached over and put his right hand on my left butt cheek. Fortunately, the elevator had reached our floor, so I just stepped aside and walked him to the [building's] exit."
She says she also witnessed crude behavior on his part with other female employees. One instance occurred in the early 1980s, when the woman says she saw Bolduc greet a female colleague whom he barely knew by pulling her into an unwilling embrace when she moved to shake his hand. Even more embarrassing, says the manager, was a scene just last year after a business meeting. "On the way out of the building, as he was saying goodbyes, Bolduc turned to one woman employee and instead of shaking her hand, pulled her toward him and stuck his tongue into her ear. She was startled, but she laughed it off. When he did the same thing to a second employee, it was no longer funny.