Please share with the cases where only actual damages were awarded and compensatory and punitive damages were prohibited as result of law....?
Secondly, please share with is how sex with a subordinate does not consist sexual harassment under the law.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 allows employees to recover compensatory damages beyond back pay. The damages can encompass “future pecuniary losses, emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other non-pecuniary losses.”
Plaintiffs can also collect punitive damages, if they can demonstrate that an employer acted with malice or with reckless or callous indifference.
The number of women involved and the callous manner in which Letterman handled the matter publicly illustrates callousness.
In addition, what Letterman/WWP?CBS lawyer is ever going to let these cases go to trial?
Maybe you set a Special Master or rent-a-retired judge, but public trial complete weeping plaintiffs, their weeping mothers and clenched jaw fathers is a disaster for CBS!
I did not say that having sex with a subordinate is not sexual harassment. I said that it is not necessarily sexual harassment. It depends on the facts.
The other point that I made was that CBS is not going to be looking at anywhere close to $100m in potential liability. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 imposes fairly low caps on what can be recovered as compensatory and punitive damages, $300k for employers having in excess of 500 workers.
Finally, the standard required for an award of punitive damages is very high. They are only awarded when malice is shown. They are not automatically awarded in sexual harassment cases by a long shot. There is nothing in the facts of which we are aware so far that would suggest that CBS's or Letterman's bad behavior rose to that level. And again, even if it did the award would be capped.
So the bottom line is that both Letterman and CBS are looking at some potential legal liability and certainly are going to suffer some bad publicity, but there is little likelihood that it's going to break their backs financially. I despise them as much as anybody else on this board and wish it would happen, but I don't see it.