Montgomery, Alabama -- A woman who once worked at Alabama State University has won a sexual-harassment lawsuit against one of the institution’s former presidents. The jury verdict ended weeks of conflicting testimony that included lurid accounts of sex in the president’s office and an alleged attempted rape in the employee’s home.
The lawsuit was filed by the Rev. Venus Longmire, who coordinated the campus-ministry programs at Alabama State until she was dismissed in 1991. Ms. Longmire charged the former president, Leon Howard, with sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, and assault and battery.
The jury upheld the charges, awarding $80,000 in her civil complaint against the former president. It awarded an additional $250,000 for a separate claim she had filed against the head of the governing board, Joe L. Reed. Ms. Longmire said Mr. Reed had fired her in retaliation for an unrelated ethics complaint she filed against him.
The case is complicated because while Ms. Longmire’s claims against the two men were initially unrelated, they became interwoven through their connection with the university.
Both men denied all the charges. Mr. Howard’s lawyer, George Beck, Jr., said his client had not decided whether to appeal the decision. Mr. Howard himself could not be reached. Neither Mr. Reed nor his lawyer returned telephone calls.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Longmire said that during her four years at Alabama State, she had endured escalating sexual harassment from the president -- beginning with flirtations, then invitations for sex, and eventually an attempted rape in 1989.
Mr. Howard was later indicted by a grand jury on charges of attempted rape. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, “harassing communications,” and resigned as president. He took a job at Morgan State University, where he served as a special assistant to the president before resigning last month when the jury reached its verdict in Ms. Longmire’s case. Morgan State’s president, Earl S. Richardson, did not return telephone calls but he told news organizations that he had known nothing of the charges against Mr. Howard until the verdict. Ms. Longmire said she found it “hard to believe” that Mr. Richardson didn’t know about the case. “It’s a close-knit group,” she added, referring to the fact that both men were presidents of historically black institutions.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Longmire charged that the president had withheld her paychecks and interfered with her employment contracts because she refused his overtures. In addition, she charged that the university had ignored her complaints.
During the trial, Ms. Longmire’s lawyer, Rose Sanders, said that a former Alabama State administrator had told her that in the 1970’s, Mr. Howard had been asked to leave a previous job at a university because of sexual misconduct. Mr. Beck denied those allegations.
Before filing the suit, Ms. Longmire lodged a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Around the same time, she filed an unrelated complaint against Mr. Reed with the state ethics board. The latter filing questioned whether Mr. Reed’s purchase of property surrounding the university was a conflict of interest. Mr. Reed was not found to have done anything wrong.
In early 1991, after the EEOC found that Ms. Longmire’s complaint about Mr. Howard had merit, Mr. Reed set up a committee of board members to investigate it. The panel said that her complaint lacked merit.
Mr. Beck, Mr. Howard’s lawyer, contended that she had been “the aggressor” in a consensual relationship with the former president. In the trial’s closing arguments, Mr. Beck noted that Ms. Longmire shared the name of the Greek Goddess of Love. In an interview, he said he had told the jury that Homer described Venus as “treacherous” because she was “beguiling” to gods and men.
Mr. Beck also said the former president had “bent over backwards” to persuade the university’s board members to make Ms. Longmire’s job permanent. But after the board cut her job in 1991, Ms. Longmire contended that the board chairman had punished her for filing the ethics complaint. One of her lawyers called the committee’s investigation “a whitewash.”
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson agreed. He suggested that what had been called an investigation was really a cover-up. The judge found that the university’s procedures for dealing with sexual-harassment complaints were inadequate, and he ordered Alabama State to revise them.
Judge Thompson must still rule on whether Alabama State must reinstate Ms. Longmire and award her back pay.