Speaker 1
So, I want to start with a question for you, me here, and then I'm going to throw it open. Like, this is a live case study. So, imagine you are the CEO of a company, and your chief operating officer has been accused of sexual assault by another employee, a lowered level employee that you honestly had never heard of before this moment. According to her story, they were working late, just the two of them. They finished work. He offered to give her a ride home. They got to her apartment. He started to come on to her. She resisted. They ended up having sex against her will according to her. Okay. She's very traumatized by it. She reported it to the police, but the signal she's gotten from the police is probably not going to be enough evidence to actually file charges. But she's gone to HR, and she wants this person to be held accountable. He claims the whole thing was consensual.
Speaker 2
He has admitted that something happened. He says
Speaker 1
it was consensual. What do you
Speaker 2
do? Okay, so let's get some more facts. Okay. How long has he been with the
Speaker 2
It's a make-believe case. I know. Have there been any previous? Three years. No. There has
Speaker 1
not been. There has not been a previous
Speaker 2
complaint at all. And at the time, have we confronted him? Well, no. You've
Speaker 1
just learned about this. You've just learned
Speaker 2
about it. Your head
Speaker 1
of HR has come to you and said, this thing landed on my desk this morning, and you've got to figure out what to do. Okay.
Speaker 2
think there's a couple of first steps one has to take. Yeah. And I'm not going to try to be overly legalistic, but I think you want to talk to your general counsel. And you want your general counsel in the room with this kind of a topic. And I think absent legal kind of constraints, I think you want to confront him and ask him about the nature of this. And it doesn't need to be accusatory, but it has to be you want to hear it from him, what has happened. Subsequent to that, assuming he does the same thing he's done already, which is he's basically said, it is true, but it was consensual.
