Bill Clinton should be happy that Paula Jones' sexual-harassment lawsuit against him won't be decided by the city attorney of little Murfreesboro, Tenn. It was there in 1995 that local artist Maxine Henderson exhibited some of her work in the city hall rotunda, including Gwen, a painting of a partly nude woman. A city employee saw the painting and was offended--so much so that she filed a sexual-harassment complaint against her employer. City attorney Tom Reed promptly whisked the painting away. Although a judge eventually ruled that Henderson had a First Amendment right to hang her art in the rotunda (it's a public place, after all), the lawsuit frightened Reed. To this day, he won't allow Gwen to be displayed in city offices that aren't public places. "In my opinion, that would count as sexual harassment," he says.
In today's overheated legal environment, if an impressionistic painting more modest than many a Matisse can, on its own, count as sexual harassment, the President could be doomed. Jones maintains that as Governor of Arkansas, Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex at a Little Rock hotel. There was nothing impressionistic about it, Jones said in her deposition last fall: "I mean, it was disgusting."
Her account is a matter of great dispute, one likely to land the President's case in an Arkansas courtroom in May. But in truth the tangle of laws currently defining sexual harassment is so jumbled that even if everyone could agree on the facts, it's simply impossible to predict the outcome of a case like Jones v. Clinton. Just 25 years ago, sexual harassment was considered a radical-fringe by-product of feminist theory. Today it's embedded in multiple Supreme Court decisions (three more are expected before July), thousands of corporate policies and a host of lower-court cases that have spread like kudzu across the legal landscape. The result is a thicket of rulings. Since 1991, juries have returned well over 500 verdicts on sexual harassment--decisions that often contradict one another and send mixed signals about how we should behave anytime we meet a co-worker we'd like to see after five.
Because of the twin trends of long hours (10% more than we worked in 1969) and more women working (18 million more today than in 1980, or about 50% of the labor force), more Americans than ever are flirting, dating and propositioning at work. Actually, only a tiny proportion of office come-ons result in harassment complaints; of those that do, just 9% end up in formal proceedings, whereas 38% of relationships that start on the job survive into the long term. The huge surge in sexual-harassment cases that took place in the early '90s has slowed. Such cases are still being filed at the rate of 15,500 a year--some 60 new cases every working day--compared with 6,900 in 1991, but the number hasn't changed much for three years. A recent survey of human-resources managers found that 7 out of 10 handled at least one sexual-harassment complaint last year, down from 9 out of 10 in 1995.