Via the Washington Post, October 20, 2017 – How the legal world built a wall of silence around workplace sexual harassment – Confidentiality agreements serve to protect abusers, by Minna J. Kotkin – a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in employment.discrimination. “A secret about sexual harassment on the job is finally coming to light. It’s not that harassment is still rampant in some industries, recalling the worst of the “Mad Men” days. Or that networks of women quietly help to protect their co-workers from the worst offenders. The real secret is that our regulatory and judicial systems are complicit in protecting harassers from public exposure and opprobrium. Recent revelations about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein show that they confidentially settled harassment claims in the millions of dollars over decades, using legal maneuvers to keep their conduct under the radar. How common is this? Since 1986, when the Supreme Court first recognized that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination, employers and their attorneys have generally insisted that victims who receive financial settlements as a result of harassment allegations sign confidentiality agreements. In my three decades of research and litigation on harassment claims, corporate officials have always insisted that unless settlements are confidential, firms will be overwhelmed by a deluge of accusations, with every disgruntled employee looking for a payout…Less than 3 percent of employment discrimination cases go to trial, with a public verdict. Legal scholars and researchers estimate that close to 80 percent of the cases result in settlements, with the remainder dismissed before trial. Cases that settle are protected by confidentiality agreements, so we don’t know what the terms look like…”