Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [94]
JULIE ANDERSON, Producer:
They were hiring some young PAs who were very cute. It was the first wave of cute young girls. Or maybe I was a cute young girl when I was there; I have no idea. There was this one girl, really skinny and very pretty, and she felt very threatened. It’s not a nine-to-five place, so when you’re on a show, you’re there with your people on that show all the time, at night, on weekends, and the higher-ups were there from nine to five, right? There was no supervision. It was really hard for management to keep an eye on what was going on. And then, if you’re in production and on the road, my God, the road. Everything happens on the road.
KARIE ROSS:
There were two particular people who had been trying to pursue me, and even though I told them I had a boyfriend, I had no interest in them, and I wanted to just keep things professional, they just wouldn’t take the hint. I learned that when stories were being assigned and my name would come up, those two guys would shoot me down, saying I couldn’t handle it.
GRACE GALLO:
I myself didn’t see a lot of sexual harassment, but it was very easy to get away with bad behavior, let’s put it that way.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
We were hiring these kids right out of college, and all of a sudden we’re paying them to do what they used to do for nothing with their friends in the frat house. We had a bunch of twenty-three-year-old bosses of twenty-two-year-olds with absolutely nothing else to do up there. So there were a lot of issues, and we had some high-profile ones.
KARIE ROSS:
I wrote an anonymous letter—I certainly wasn’t going to put my name on it; that would have been a career killer—to USA Today, saying we were going through a lot of sexual harassment at ESPN. I basically explained the situation. I was hoping and praying that this columnist, Rachel Shuster, would call somebody about it or report the story. But they didn’t do anything about it, maybe because I didn’t put my name on it.
The things that I remember were guys patting the girls, telling them they looked sexy in that dress, and a lot of verbal stuff. I don’t think a lot of these men knew what they were doing was illegal, but they should have known that using the influence of their position to date or get sexual favors from these girls underneath them—who had no power whatsoever—was not right.
The younger women started confiding in me because they felt like I was the only one that had any clout at all, I guess because I was a female on air. It was getting harder and harder for women to work there. They were just out of college and getting hit on and harassed like crazy. They were put in such horrible situations. There were guys trying to trade editing time. It was a big commodity, and there were only a few of these edit booths. You had to get the time to put your pieces together. They were saying to the women, “Look, I’ve got the editing time you need, but I’ll swap it with you if you’ll go out with me.” I could slap these guys upside of the head and say, “Absolutely not, buddy!” but these girls couldn’t. You weren’t taken very seriously.
FRED GAUDELLI:
In Connecticut the bars closed early. Most of the time, they closed before we got out of work. A lot of times the best-looking women you were going to find were sitting right next to you in your office. We were all very, very young, and this was pre Anita Hill, so the corporate culture in America was much different than it is today. You might see a guy rubbing a girl’s shoulders or telling her, “Hey, you’re looking pretty hot today,” something like that. But you’re twenty-three or twenty-two years old. You’re not thinking like this person might not want this, you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m still in college and this is not a big deal.” Again, you’re working with a bunch of guys, you all love sports, and you wound up doing things that jocks like to