How Lawyers Protect the Harvey Weinstein in Your Workplace
In workplace harassment cases — both in Hollywood and in the rest of the American workforce — many companies try to use nondisclosure agreements to protect the employer from legal consequences for wrongdoing, according to Bloomberg Law. And the NDA can also serve to keep criminal behavior out of the public eye and the courts.
That’s how someone like Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein can be a repeat offender without consequence, explains Bloomberg reporter Rebecca Greenfield.
She quotes Peter Romer-Friedman, an employment lawyer at Outten and Golden: “It’s buying silence. It’s buying confidentiality. It’s trying to sanitize. These agreements are often protecting criminal activity.”
“NDAs are geared to ensure that the fraction of people who do come forward can’t warn others or bring claims to light, all of which contributes to the culture of silence around workplace harassment.
Legal scholars are now asking if settlements backed by nondisclosure pacts are protecting criminal activity,” Greenfield writes.