”I had the guts to fight these men,” said former Western Cape MEC Frieda Adams following this week’s conclusion of her four-year legal battle over her allegations of sexual harassment and defamation against former party colleagues Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel.
The Cape High Court on Wednesday awarded her damages for injured feelings, stemming from remarks by both male politicians. But it found that Adams had not sufficiently proved her case of sexual harassment against Marais following his alleged unwanted sexual approaches towards her between August 1999 and February 2000.
However, in its judgement, the court has left the door open for Adams to pursue the sexual harassment claim if she is able to provide more evidence.
While Adams feels vindicated the finding has angered women’s rights lobbyists.
The Cape Town-based Women’s Legal Centre has expressed its concern because the ruling appears to be based on a presumption of vindictive women with revenge on their minds.
”Every myth that we are trying to keep out of the courts in sexual violence cases has come [into this one],” says Nikki Naylor, an attorney at the centre.
The judgement was based on what Adams had done, or not done, to avoid further harassment, and on her behaviour. It applied caution as to which version to believe. While the court held that Adams could not have thumb-sucked comments by Morkel and Marais (and it awarded damages for these), it did not find that these statements amounted to sexual harassment.
Yet sexual harassment is legally defined as ”unwanted conduct of a sexual nature”, which can be verbal, physical or quid pro quo actions. A single incident is considered harassment and is tantamount to discrimination.
Naylor says in cases of, for example, a racist joke, it was held that the intention behind spreading it and whether anyone laughed was irrelevant. What counted was that the person’s dignity had been impaired. ”Why don’t we [take] this test when dealing with sexual harassment,” she said. Instead the judgement dealt with sexual harassment in a vacuum, without placing it in the context of discrimination.
The four-year legal saga was steeped in political power plays, salacious details and counter defamation suits. It also emerged that there was no love lost between Marais, Morkel and Adams, whose political paths diverged as their original political home, the New National Party, first merged into and then divorced from the Democratic Alliance. Adams briefly joined National Action last year, but has left.
To date, Adams is the only woman politician to have gone public with sexual harassment claims. When the case came to court in early 2002, Marais was Western Cape premier. At the time he was facing several other sexual harassment claims, which led to his resignation as premier and from the NNP at the end of May.
In this Adams found consolation, she told the Mail & Guardian. ”Other women came forward — I opened their eyes: You don’t have to be silent.”
But she also admits the cost has been high: her family home, built by her husband, is to go on sale.