Weather Channel Sexual Harassment Suit

If there was ever an example of how NOT to handle sexual harassment in the workplace, look no further than The Weather Channel.

Former co-anchor Hillary Andrews filed suit----and won----against The Weather Channel’s Bob Stokes, her former co-anchor, after a laundry list of inappropriate comments and unwanted sexual advances were made to her during her employment at the network.

Andrews’ suit claimed that Stokes made several inappropriate sexual advances, including following her into her dressing room and asking if she would like to lick his “swizzle stick.” When Andrews responded negatively to Stokes’ remarks, Stokes began to insult her on the air and attempted to “sabotage her on-air performance,” according to arbitration documents.

The next step was to take the issue to upper management, who then placed Andrews on the night-shift while leaving the highly-rated Stokes on air during prime-time hours.

Exhausted and out of options, Andrews eventually resigned. Not surprisingly, Stokes was fired shortly after losing the case, and The Weather Channel is doing all it can to prevent any documentation of the suit from becoming public.

However, they have thus far been unsuccessful. The internet is teaming with stories, blogs, and copies of arbitration documents related to the suit. All this is because TWC wouldn’t do the right thing in the first place when they had the chance.

However, there is always a silver lining, and the good thing is that now people are talking about sexual harassment, how to handle it, and how to prevent it.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC received 12,510 sexual harassment charges in fiscal year 2007. 16 percent of these complaints were filed by males.

And according to the EEOC, “prevention is the best tool to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace.”

Sexual harassment training is not mandatory in every state, but there is no doubt that had The Weather Channel mandated such training for its employees, it may have been able to prevent these types of incidents from happening. At the least, the network could have had some liability relief in such a case. Learn2Serve.com offers sexual harassment training in an online format, giving companies the peace of mind that guidelines for behavior have been established, and possibly even granting them insurance relief.

“Our training removes undue burdens from the shoulders of the companies,” said Joy Sisson, Business Unit Manager for Learn2Serve.com. “It promotes personal responsibility for individual employees, and definitely makes it easier on the company to handle such issues if and when they arise.”