Legal Momentum Briefing Room

Legal Momentum Applauds Senator Franken’s Amendment to Guarantee Sexual Assault Victims Their Day in Court

In 2005, a 19-year-old Halliburton/KBR Contractor named Jamie Leigh Jones was drugged, gang raped by her coworkers in Iraq, and imprisoned in a shipping container for 24 hours without food or water when she tried to report the assault. Halliburton/KBR stationed security guards outside the shipping container and warned Jones that she would lose her job if she left Iraq for medical treatment.   

Through a sympathetic security guard, Jones contacted her father who, with the help of their congressmen, sent agents from the American Embassy in Iraq to free his daughter. Though Army doctors who examined Jones stated that she had been anally and vaginally raped, her rape kit “disappeared” in the hands of KBR security officers.  

The Justice Department declined to investigate the case and a fine-print clause in Jones’s KBR contract barred her from pressing criminal charges in U.S. courts.  Instead, Jones’s contract mandated arbitration – with an arbiter approved by KBR - in secret, with no right to an appeal.

After 15 months in arbitration, Jones took KBR to court to fight the company’s mandatory arbitration policy. In September, the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor, stating that her allegations were not related to her employment with Halliburton/KBR and therefore not subject to arbitration. 

To ensure that no other women would have to endure the emotionally brutal and unjust process that Jones faced, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) introduced an amendment to the FY2010 Defense Appropriations Bill that would prohibit contracting with defense companies that force their employees into mandatory binding arbitration in sexual assault cases. 61 organizations, including Legal Momentum, endorsed Senator Franken’s amendment. On October 6, the Senate passed the amendment by a vote of 68-30.  

Legal Momentum applauds Senator Franken and his Senate colleagues for recognizing the importance of granting sexual assault victims their day in court. All sexual assault victims struggle with the decision to report their abuse, fearing traumatic police investigations and court procedures. Victims like Jamie Leigh Jones, who courageously told and retold her story, should be encouraged to report assault for their safety and their community’s safety. Mandatory arbitration shrouds these cases in secrecy, hiding the victims who bravely decide to report and retraumatizing them through an unjust process.   

The House has yet to vote on their FY 2010 Defense Appropriations Bill. Legal Momentum encourages them to pass the Bill with Senator Franken’s amendment intact.

For more information:

• Read Senator Franken’s press release on the amendment.
• Read Jamie Leigh Jones's harrowing story from ABC News.
• Read the opinion of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Jones v. Halliburton.
• Read Maiming the Soul: Judges, Sentencing, and the Myth of the Nonviolent Rapist, which prosecutors and parole/probation still use to inform judges about the lasting impact of rape of any kind, by Legal Momentum's National Judicial Education Program Director Lynn Hecht Schafran.

Legal Momentum Praises U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Crawford Case

Supreme Court Rules Against Employer Retaliation

January 26, 2009 -

Legal Momentum applauds the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in Crawford v. Metropolitan Gov’t of Nashville and Davidson Co., Tenn. In a resounding victory for employees everywhere, the Court ruled that workers who provide information during an employer’s investigation of a sexual harassment or other discrimination complaint are protected from retaliation by federal law. Federal law makes it just as illegal for an employer to retaliate against someone who complains of discrimination as it is for an employer to discriminate in the first place. 

In its 7-2 decision in favor of Vicky Crawford -- who was fired after she corroborated a co-worker’s sexual harassment complaint against her boss by disclosing that the same supervisor harassed her – the Court rejected the argument that the law’s ban on retaliation did not apply to Ms. Crawford because she did not file her own harassment complaint.The law’s protection is much broader than that, said the Court, and protects employees who oppose discrimination in other ways – such as by honestly answering an employer’s questions, like Ms. Crawford did.   

The anti-discrimination laws succeed or fail in large part based on employees’ willingness to speak up about misconduct. “The Court did a service to all employees today by recognizing that Vicky Crawford and people like her need to feel confident that if they disclose what they know, they won’t be punished for it,” says Irasema Garza, President of Legal Momentum. “But the Court’s ruling also benefits employers, because when workers feel safe voicing concerns about discrimination and harassment, employers can fix those problems before they become lawsuits.” 

Guest Worker Sex Discrimination Case Certified as Class Action

The federal district court for the Middle District of North Carolina granted  in January 2008 Plaintiff’s motion for the certification of a plaintiff class in a case that claims that the defendant labor recruiter firms steer women guest workers into jobs with lower pay and fewer benefits than the jobs that they reserve almost exclusively for men guest workers. The case, Olvera-Morales v. International Labor Management Corp,. involves the federal H-2 guest worker program, a program that provides a legal means for foreign workers to fill temporary positions in the U.S. MORE