Kamala Harris was forced to criticize her husband’s law firm’s procedure for dealing with employee sexual assault accusations, after she was called out in a public letter written by an attorney for an alleged sexual assault victim.
Vanina Guerrero, a junior partner at DLA Piper, accused her supervisor at the law firm of sexual harassment and assault in a complaint filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission earlier this month. Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, is a partner at the firm.
Guerrero’s attorney, Jeanne M. Christensen, published an open letter on Monday criticizing DLA Piper for its mandatory arbitration process, which requires employees to settle their complaints through an arbitrator rather than a public court process.
Christensen called on Harris to “publicly support the notion that all women who work at DLA Piper deserve to hear allegations about unlawful sexual conduct by male employees.”
“Given your profile as a candidate for the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, you are in a unique position to condemn the actions of DLA Piper and make clear that mandatory arbitration must stop,” wrote Christensen.
On Tuesday, Harris responded and criticized DLA Piper for abiding by this practice, according to NBC News. “Senator Harris has been and continues to be a staunch advocate for survivors and believes all people must be guaranteed their day in court. She has long opposed forced arbitration agreements and that position has not changed and she does not believe this is any exception,” a representative for Harris told NBC News.
Harris has previously spoken out against companies that require employees to settle their sexual harassment claims in a private arbitration process rather than in public court. In June, Harris and Sen. Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon asking him to end the company’s mandatory arbitration practices.
The letter called mandatory arbitration a “reviled practice” and added that the “#MeToo movement continues to expose workplace harassers who force survivors into arbitration.”
In an EEOC complaint, Guerrero claimed she was sexually assaulted by her boss at the firm during multiple business trips in 2018.
Her attorney, Christensen, has been pressing DLA Piper to waive its mandatory arbitration clause, calling it a “draconian policy that disproportionately protects male predators at the expense of women.”
