How Do I Document Sexual Harassment
We here at the Law Office of Jim Zadeh have represented victims of sexual harassment for over 15 years, and one of the issues that comes up pretty much in every case, is how much documentation has the victim kept and how much should they have been collected. In my opinion the documentation that the victim should keep needs to be extensive. We had one case where a lady had a calendar and she wrote down the events as they occurred, we recommend as those events occur you also report those events in writing to the Human Resource Department or whoever is listed in the company policy for reporting sexual harassment. You need to make sure that it’s done in writing whether it be via email or via letter, it doesn’t matter but it should be something in writing to the Human Resources Department documenting your complaint as to when you submitted the complaint. So, let's say, as it often happens in a case of sexual harassment, it starts with really small stuff such as: small comments, forcing you into a corner where you feel uncomfortable something that's not major and you don’t document. Have you lost your case? - Absolutely not. If you can as it starts to escalate go back and re-create a journal with dates you remember of when it occurred, write down any notes you remember, and begin documenting going forward. Obviously if documentation such as you recording them or taking video of them while they're doing it can put you in any sort of danger, then we do not recommend you doing it. Sometimes it will escalate to such an extent that you trying to photograph them or videotape them will cause that person to explode or cause violence and we highly recommend that you don’t do that, just use your common sense, but we do recommend that you document as it occurs.
