No Law
For ninteen-year-old Mechelle Vinson, coming from her family home among the battered bungalows of a one-block street in northeast Washington, in a neighborhood wedged between railway lines, it was all uphill, two miles uphill along Rhode Island Avenue to the bank where she found her first professional opportunity. Capital City Federal Savings & Loan sat at the crest of the broad street. Looking left from the front door of the bank, a teller could see the red-brick walls and white-doric columns of the National Bank of Washington and, looking right, the blocky red brick of a union headquarters. Straight across from the bank stood the imposing Romanesque columns and arches of St. Frances de Sales School and, to its right, the church of St. Frances de Sales, home to the oldest Catholic congregation in the District of Columbia.
To Mechelle Vinson, Capital City Federal was more than a bank. It was her family bank and her neighborhood bank, “a very small, black bank,” she would later call it, in what felt to her like a very small, black neighborhood—one of those close-knit and steady urban communities of Washington where everyone knew everyone else. Vinson had wanted a job at this bank, and she had gone after it, she let people know, because she was young and willing to learn and because she felt a struggle to “be something.”
One day in September of 1974 she saw the bank’s manager, whom she knew as Mr. Taylor, walking down the street, and she asked if he had any job openings. He gave her an application, and within a few days she was a teller trainee. She had been working jobs since she was twelve, and by age fifteen she had started a marriage that was now having problems, and she saw the bank as her chance finally to advance. Her job evaluations, over the months and years ahead, were described by the bank as “outstanding.” She rose quickly from trainee to teller to head teller to assistant branch manager. Sidney Taylor evaluated her, on a scale of 1 to 10, as a “9 plus,” and by late 1978 she was holding the positions of head teller and assistant branch manager simultaneously. People noticed her cheerful voice and dramatic looks—most strikingly her bronze-colored skin, her high forehead, and her prominent nose that gave her the look of a Mayan princess. She was ambitious and skilled, a fine manager who, as Taylor would tell her and others, could “go far” with Capital City.
Sidney Taylor seemed a fine manager—dapper, gentlemanly, and, most inspirational for Mechelle Vinson, self-made. Not many years before, he had come out of military service and taken a job as a janitor with this very bank. Through hard work, he had risen to become not just manager of the branch but also the bank’s first assistant vice president who was black and, he believed, the first black assistant manager for any major savings association in DC. He had made a home for his wife and seven children only a few minutes’ walk from his bank, and he walked the streets often to build his business. He was proud that the branch had grown in size under his care. He was proud, also, that as a bank vice president he could help his community and create jobs for young black employees with potential, like Vinson.
When she arrived at the bank, Vinson wanted to prove to Mr. Taylor, as she always called him, that she had potential. But even during her initial ninety-day probationary period, she would later say, she began to wonder about how Mr. Taylor treated his workers—or at least, how he treated the one other teller working at the bank, Christine Malone. Christina, as Vinson called her, was training Mechelle in day-to-day bank work, and together with Taylor they would become a close-knit unit. Some days he would bring them flowers, what she called “prettying up” their teller windows. Some evenings he would even treat the two of them to an early dinner, according to Vinson, at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant.
At times Mr. Taylor handed out, Vinson recalled, something new to her in the world of business: overtime pay for hours she had not worked. When she asked if there had been a mistake, she remembered that he would respond, “You all have worked so good, that is the reason why I gave you the overtime.” Vinson remembered exclaiming, “Oh Christina, we have the greatest boss,” to which Christina replied, Vinson recalled, “Oh you just don’t know.”
Occasionally, Vinson sensed she had entered a less-than-happy work environment. She thought she noticed Mr. Taylor brushing Christina’s bottom, or touching her breasts, or chasing her in the back of the bank where the typewriters were kept. Christina seemed not to appreciate Mr. Taylor’s behavior, but she was a bashful girl, thought Vinson, who didn’t know how to keep a man at bay. To Vinson, Christina seemed to have been raised by parents like her own, who didn’t teach girls how to communicate about sex or how to keep men from getting their way. Vinson remembered a little ditty Christina would use:
Your eyes may shine, your teeth may grit,
But none of this, you shall get.
Perhaps the ditty was too playful. Vinson thought it did not help Christina.
Then one day when Mechelle and Christina were in the ladies’ bathroom, as Vinson remembered, Mr. Taylor barged in on them. Vinson recalled that he took his penis, pulled it up inside his pants, pulled his pants back in order to show it against the cloth of the pants, and seemed to shake it at Christina. Vinson recalled that when Mr. Taylor realized Mechelle was in the bathroom too, he said, “Excuse me.” Vinson felt that whatever was going on between Mr. Taylor and Christina was between the two of them. Perhaps they had once had a relationship, she thought, and it had gone bad. Vinson had been raised to believe that when it’s not your business, “you see and you don’t say.”
One Friday, according to Vinson, Christina and Mr. Taylor had a fight over Christina’s trouble counting money—“settling her sheet,” which was required before they could all leave for the weekend. Mr. Taylor was saying, “You’re gonna settle this goddamn sheet, bitch,” as Vinson recalled, Christina was saying, “I’m not gonna settle this damn sheet,” and Mechelle was in the middle trying to keep them from fighting. Then Christina said she’d had enough and stormed out the door. Next week, Christina didn’t have a job.
WITH CHRISTINE MALONE GONE, a new saga began—at least as recalled by Vinson. Without Malone, Vinson would have no one to vouch for her story, and Sidney Taylor would deny most of it. Indeed, the stories have never been verified.
In Vinson’s narrative, Taylor continued his generosity, even giving her $120 when she was short on money to begin renting an apartment. Then, a couple of weeks after she had moved, he invited her to join him for dinner. While they were sitting there, she recalled, he said to her, “Mechelle, I have been good to you.” When she said she appreciated it, he said he didn’t want her to say thank you, she recalled: he wanted her to go to bed with him. And he warned her, according to Vinson, that “just like he hired me, he would fire me.”
After dinner, she said, she got in his car, and they drove to a nearby hotel, where he got them a room. There, she recalled afterward, he told her to take her dress off, but she said no. He said she was a grown lady now, he wouldn’t hurt her, and she should take her clothes off. Again she said no. He went to take a shower. She waited, sitting on the bed. He came back wearing no clothes and told her to undress, she recalled, and when she said no, he unzipped her dress and took it off and began kissing her and, as she would eventually tell a courtroom, “he put his penis in.” In a courtroom years later, she would retell these events precisely but without drama, and she would insist that she never consented to sex. But though she claimed she said “no,” she didn’t otherwise resist. She gave in, she said.
Years later in court, he insisted that “there was never a time that I indulged in sex with Ms. Vinson,” and he denied all of her assertions about having sex.
As Vinson recalled, after they left the hotel Mr. Taylor drove her back to her apartment. At least, after giving in to sex this time, she would later say, “I felt I didn’t owe him anything—it was over.” But the next morning at work, she said, he touched her buttocks and breasts. In the afternoon, when customers thinned out, she said, he touched her again. She felt sick inside. He told her that he was her supervisor, that he gave her her paycheck, and that she had to do what he wanted.
In the coming months, she recalled being forced to have sex many times, always in the bank, even once on the floor of the bank’s walk-in vault. She had stayed late at Taylor’s instructions, to prepare for an inspection the next day by federal auditors. As she was working there, she later testified,
the vault door closed, and Mr. Taylor grabbed me and said, “You are going to fuck me this evening.” I said, “Mr. Taylor, only thing I want to do is do my work and leave here.” He said, “You are going to fuck me before you leave here.” We got to tussling on the floor. He knocked me down on the floor and took my panties off and he forced his penis in me.
After that, she found her vagina was torn, she said, and she bled for weeks.
When he wasn’t forcing her to have sex, she later remembered, some days he would put his hands on her body, even from behind while she was working with customers. At times he would follow her into the ladies’ bathroom, she recalled, showing her that his penis was erect or asking her if she knew where he could get his “dick sucked” or telling her, “You are going to fuck me this evening.” When she told him he should stop, she recalled, sometimes he would respond, “I give you a paycheck.”
Vinson believed Taylor’s sexual affairs extended beyond herself, for one of her regular jobs as teller became to hand money to one of his “outside women,” as she put it, a woman who often visited the bank. After she had become assistant branch manager, she said, two junior bank employees came to her to request that she, as their superior, intercede for them with their boss; they said they were “tired of Mr. Taylor touching them.” When she carried their complaint to Taylor, she would later recall, he told her that he was just “relaxing” his employees and the ones who didn’t like it could “get the hell out.” Vinson stayed. In years to come, after she finally told her story, many people asked her a one-word question: “Why?”
“Because he had told me this is what I had to do—I owed him,” she would say. “Just like he hired me, he would fire me. So that was going in my head. This man would fire me. My God. I need my job.”
MECHELLE VINSON TOLD HER STORY TO ALMOST NO ONE, until one day in September of 1978. Having decided that she needed to divorce the husband whom she had married when she was about fifteen years old and with whom she was having problems, some violent she said, when she began work at the bank in 1974, she went to an office that ran a TV ad for “low-cost divorces—$275.” There she met an easy-to-talk-to young lawyer named Judith Ludwic, and within a few meetings they had arranged the divorce.
When the divorce was almost final, the usually immaculate Vinson came by Ludwic’s office, looking wretched. Her hair was falling out, with bald spots showing. Ludwic told her that when a relationship comes to an end, people are often upset, and she asked Vinson, Is that what’s bothering you? Vinson said no: “I have a boss that’s bothering me.” Then, speaking in her matter-of-fact voice, Vinson finally told someone part of her long story. It went late into the night. Ludwic had the impression that Mechelle had never intended to divulge any of this information. Mechelle couldn’t stop crying. Throughout, Ludwic noted, Mechelle was always very respectful of her boss, calling him Mr. Taylor.
But Ludwic was horrified. “What locked in my mind,” she said later, was the vault. She imagined the door closing with a steel wheel and being sexually assaulted in a stainless-steel place. It was like being raped in a morgue.
Ludwic, just out of law school, had passed the bar less than a year before. She had gone to the University of Detroit at night while earning a living teaching high school. She hadn’t entered the legal profession to defend the rights of women and hadn’t ever called herself a feminist. She couldn’t remember law books explaining anything that would help Vinson. Still, Ludwic was outraged, and she told Mechelle, speaking as her lawyer, that she did not have to have sex to keep a job.
Unfortunately, as Ludwic would later recall, “On what legal ground I stood, I did not know.” As it happens, that ground was thin. In the spring of 1975, when Vinson was first caught in what she recalled as a mix of sexual advance and coercion by her boss, there was, for all practical purposes, no law to help her.
IN THE YEARS THAT MECHELLE VINSON was feeling “bothered” by her boss, American law was beginning to hear stories remarkably like hers. Other women were starting to tell their stories in court, even though there was no law to address their dilemmas.
In Washington, DC, in the early 1970s, an administrative assistant named Paulette Barnes, who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency’s director of equal employment opportunity, reported that soon after she was hired, her boss began going after her for “sexual favors” and telling her that “if she cooperated with him in a sexual affair, her employment status would be enhanced.” Barnes found a coworker willing to support her story because she too had experienced his unseemly behavior. Her coworker, a secretary, testified that on a business trip to Puerto Rico, the boss had arranged to book them both into the same hotel room. She learned of his plan only when he walked into what she thought was her room and began undressing. Both the secretary and Barnes reported that, after they rebuffed their boss, he began to retaliate against them at work.
In another case, in Arizona in late 1973, Jane Corne and Geneva DeVane, two clerical workers employed by Bausch & Lomb, found themselves repeatedly subjected to “verbal and physical sexual advances” by a supervisor. Once his treatment became unbearable, they resigned and filed legal complaints.
At about the same time that the Arizona women were resigning from their jobs, Adrienne Tomkins, a secretary for an electric company in New Jersey, was being asked by her new boss to dine at a hotel restaurant to discuss a promotion. Over lunch he revealed that, as she later recalled, he “wanted to lay me.” He told her that he couldn’t walk around the office with a hard-on all the time and that unless they had sex they could not have a “working relationship.” When she tried to leave the restaurant, he “restrained me physically” and said she wasn’t going anywhere but the executive suite on the hotel’s thirteenth floor. She refused. She was transferred to another department and later fired.
Also in the early 1970s, at a bank in California, a teller named Margaret Miller claimed that her boss pressured her to give in sexually, to be “cooperative.” Perhaps because he was white, Miller’s boss told her he had never before “felt this way about a black chick.” She refused and soon lost her job.
And in Washington in early 1972, Diane Williams, a young aide in the public information office of the Justice Department—of all places—reported that she was subjected to advances by her supervisor. She asserted that he sent her a note: “Seldom a day goes by without a loving thought of you.” When she rejected his advances for a sexual relationship, she alleged, his treatment of her shifted from adoration to “harassment and humiliation.” In late 1972, he fired her.
When women took their grievances to court, they left further aggrieved. In Washington, a judge told Paulette Barnes that her story involved not law but “the subtleties of an inharmonious personal relationship.” In Arizona, a judge told the two women who worked for Bausch & Lomb that federal law could not get involved “every time any employee made amorous or sexually oriented advances toward another.” He added that the “only sure way an employer could avoid such charges would be to have employees who were asexual.” In New Jersey, a judge advised Adrienne Tomkins that the law could not get involved for a simple reason: “if an inebriated approach by a supervisor to a subordinate at the office Christmas party could form the basis of a federal lawsuit for sex discrimination if a promotion or a raise is later denied to the subordinate, we would need 4,000 federal trial judges instead of some 400.” And in California, a judge told Margaret Miller that law could not get involved because her story concerned merely “a natural sex phenomenon”—the attraction of males to females. He added that her case could lead to lawsuits arising from “flirtations of the smallest order.” (The judge later told Miller’s attorney that his “gal” clerks, as he called them, refused to write the opinion he wanted, leaving him to do his own work.)
Taken in sum, these early responses of American law said to women: This problem is not legal but personal. This problem is yours.