It actually DOES matter if the other stuff happened. If he sexually harassed 2 or 3 women, the leg touches can be spun a different way.
I’m sure it could be- in a case against CBS, if CBS knew about all of it. But I think it would be mostly spin. I don’t think any of the women he just touched on the leg were really victims of sexual harassment.
That said, it might still violate the employer’s harassment policy (I’d have to know what it said), and if he has a history of doing these things, something more than just a slap on the wrist (maybe termination?) might be warranted.
That could theoretically be the case, and I’d have no particular problem with that, either. CBS could have a policy in place strictly forbidding romantic/sexual involvement between colleagues- similar to the military’s fraternization policy, maybe. It’s not a terrible policy, and there are good reasons for it. But it can be violated in a ton of different ways that don’t even come close to sexual harassment.
On the non-legal front, the leg touching seems pretty creepy to me when taken in isolation. I’d need to know what the banter was before that. When I was still in the dating pool, I would not have physically touched a woman on the leg in order to make a pass.
Yeah, the context does matter a lot. All I know is that the little I’ve read about how the women themselves described it, it didn’t sound creepy at all. It sounded totally innocuous. Like I said, one of the women said she didn’t even realize she was a victim until a decade later. Can I imagine a scenario in which the leg touches were creepy? Sure. But I’m not going to assume that when the women don’t describe them that way.
Context, again. I have touched a number of women on the leg in the course of mutual flirting. A number of women have touched me on the leg in the course of flirting. Totally normal, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. On the other hand, if you just walk up and start stroking some stranger on the thigh, that’s probably all the way to assault on the meter.