“I felt like bait.” That’s how a young woman described an alleged sexual assault at a Cornell fraternity house. According to her lawsuit, she lay incapacitated in a fraternity bedroom while members of a group chat invited other men upstairs. Some came. She alleges they assaulted her.
By the following semester, she had left her dream school. Nearly two years later, she hasn’t returned.
I know what it’s like to watch a place you worked so hard to reach become a place you’re afraid to enter. But I also know what it feels like when someone refuses to look away. About 1 in 5 women in the U.S. experiences rape, and even more of us — more than 80% — experience sexual assault or harassment.
In my office, two men saw something wrong and spoke up. My boss listened — and acted.
It happened at the company holiday party. Laughter echoed through the ballroom as we devoured prime rib and our chairman roasted the newly promoted. Champagne flutes clinked.
I was four months into a new investing job, the only woman on our 11-person deal team. I felt that ratio every morning as I walked through the alley of Patagonia vests, their owners cracking jokes I wasn’t part of. I wanted to belong.
So when a colleague told me I had a “nice complexion,” I laughed. When my manager mocked me every time I said “sorry,” I laughed again. I told myself this was the price of admission.
Then, at the holiday party, I felt a hand on my waist. Then again. And again.
My body went still before my brain caught up. I remember staring at the bottles behind the bar, reading the same label over and over.
Three times that night, a colleague groped me.
By Monday, the office looked the same. I did not.
I swapped skirts for Patagonia vests. I hoped the extra fabric would help me disappear into the sea of navy and gray. I learned his schedule so I wouldn’t be trapped in that tiny metal box for 56 floors with him. I skipped cafeteria lunches. I sped through the hallway to the bathroom and espresso machine. Once, hearing his laugh echo down the hallway, I ducked into the printer nook and fed blank pages through the copy machine until he passed.
This is the part people miss about harassment. It does not end when the touching stops. It lingers in the ordinary. Work becomes an obstacle course.
I came to that job to work hard, drink too much espresso, and do my spreadsheets. Instead, I spent every ounce of energy keeping myself safe. I was becoming less myself.
I was ready to disappear.
My boss refused to let me.
Two male colleagues had seen what happened at the party and reported it to him immediately. They did not look away, and neither did he.
That Monday morning, he cleared his calendar. He sat across from me in his fleece vest, legal pad untouched, and let me talk. No questions about my outfit. No questions about alcohol. Just: “You’re not overreacting. And you’re not imagining it.”
He insisted on HR. I panicked. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention, distract my bosses, and be known by senior partners not for my work but for what happened to me, becoming an administrative “to-do.” Even worse, if HR did nothing, it would confirm my biggest fear: that I was overreacting.
My boss understood that fear. He kept an eye out for me.
Slowly, the “boys’ club” comments I used to laugh off faded. The walk to the espresso machine became a treat again, not a sprint in loafers.
Small things, but they weren’t small to me.
My company did not fire the offender. I wish it had, as a stronger warning that such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated. But the harassment ended. So did the choreography I had built around avoiding him.
And that is why I stayed.
I know how my story could have ended. I would have kept feeding blank pages through the copier until I felt invisible enough to leave. They would have called it “turnover.”
That is the error most leaders miss. They catch the mistake in cell E473 and the typo in footnote 17, yet miss the woman who stops eating lunch, changes how she dresses, and smiles less.
So to the men who want to help: Start with the person speaking less, eating alone, changing how she dresses, or taking the long way to the bathroom. Ask. Listen. Don’t wait for an HR investigation. Don’t look away from behavior you’d never tolerate for your daughter. Don’t assume silence means she’s fine. And stay involved after HR enters the room.
I don’t know what might have helped that young woman stay at Cornell. I know what helped me: three men who saw me disappearing — and refused to let me.
Lindsay Rosston is director of operations at a health services company.
The post After a woman is harassed, male allies can make all the difference appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
