I was just trying to do my job. Instead, I was harassed by a U.S. senator.
PERSPECTIVE | It was sickening
The day I was sexually harassed by a United States senator, I wore what Banana Republic called my “sexy side-zip shirt.”
Donna Karan might say I was asking for it. That would be untrue, and unfair.
But I do admit to making a deliberate sartorial choice that rainy day back in 2003, back when I was a 25-year-old reporter. I was working at my Pennsylvania newspaper long enough to know that congressmen and governors and various other high-ranking politicians were often surrounded by young men my own age. They were the gatekeepers. Get by them, and you could get the quotes you needed.
As I was leaving my newsroom the night before, my managing editor called me over and said just a bit sternly, “Rebecca, do not let Arlen Specter leave that teen abstinence event without asking him about Pat Toomey. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
I had no choice but to wear the “sexy side-zip shirt”
Was it really that sexy? Hardly. When I bought it, I remember blushing as a cashier rang me up and the name popped up on the register. I was a late-bloomer: A horse-loving, jodhpur-wearing teenager who went off to college in windy, rural Ohio where boxy wool sweaters were all the rage. I didn’t start caring about more sophisticated clothing until around the time I bought the sexy side-zip shirt. It was a brown spandex-cotton blend, with a collar. Instead of buttoning down the front, a zipper ran up the side, hence the name.
When I put the blouse on that morning, I thought, “This will get me past Sen. Specter’s guys.”
What I didn’t expect was that I’d get a pass from the senator himself. Specter was speaking at an Urban League event honoring teen moms and at-risk kids who were taking part in some sort of don’t-get-knocked-up program. Specter called teen abstinence a subject of “general agreement.” He rambled on a bit about sexually transmitted diseases and the importance of staying in school, then passed out diapers for the cameras. And then, faster than I could make my way through a crowd of crying babies and antiabortion advocates, he was gone.
Like a good gumshoe reporter, I trailed Specter to the resort where the Lancaster County Republican party was holding its annual dinner a few miles away. Once inside the lobby, I smiled sweetly and strategically straightened out the press pass dangling below the open neck of the sexy side-zip shirt. The senator who once grilled Anita Hill was back in the private dining room. I made it past three sets of gatekeepers and found myself in a secluded corner, alone with about eight men. I sat down with Specter, and asked if he was worried about losing the primary to the much more conservative, much more “pro-life” Pat Toomey.
He was not.
You may know the rest of that story. Specter won the 2004 primary by a mere 1.5 percent. Then he switched parties and died, at which point his seat did indeed go to Toomey. But that night I got the senator to tell me he was unconcerned about his right-of-the-right opponent, I figured the hard part of my job was done. Then I asked the senator why he was passing out diapers and supporting a special federal program, instituted by President George W. Bush, to promote teen abstinence.
“You’re going to have to talk to a member of my staff about that,” Specter said.
And then, in a loud voice he yelled across the small room, “Hey Dave, get over here, this young lady wants to make love to you.”
Time stopped. Everyone — all those young male staffers — was guffawing. The noise reverberated like eerie laughs in a roomful of fun house mirrors.
I kept it together and interviewed Dave. Then I went out to my Pontiac and cried. I felt dirty. Like I’d made a spectacle of my body just by wearing a fashionable shirt and it was all my fault. On my clunky cellphone, I called another reporter who had previously worked on Capitol Hill. Tearfully, I relayed what the senator had said.
“Aw, that’s just Specter. He’s terrible,” my male colleague said. “He throws staplers at his staff.”
“But that’s awful,” I replied, sniffling “How can that be okay?”
“That’s just the way it is, Rebecca,” my male colleague replied.
“That’s just the way it is with powerful men.”
To this day, I remember that night with sinking feeling in my stomach, like a sudden drop in airplane altitude. In the grand scheme of things, what Specter said to me was not nearly as bad as film producer Harvey Weinstein asking an actress for a massage. But for me, it was sickening. It was horrible to learn that if a woman was alone in a roomful of men, it was perfectly acceptable for a sitting member of Congress to joke about his staff member having sex with her right there and then. And if that was okay now, what would be okay next time?
I went back to my newsroom, wrote up my story about Specter, teen abstinence and the future Sen. Pat Toomey.
Then I went home, and threw the sexy side-zip shirt in my Goodwill pile.
I never wore it again.
