Weblog Entry - 08/25/2002: "Oh Mary Doncha Weep"

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08/25/2002 "Oh Mary Doncha Weep"

On Book TV today, (C-Span2), the two attorneys who brought to the 8th circuit, a class action against the mine that allowed brutal sexual harassment against women miners.
Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Gansler (Doubleday)
Points of Interest
1. The union betrayed the women.
2. The landmark appellate decision in this case limits the defendant's discovery into the medical/mental health background of the victim, specifically how far into the past they can go for such material.
Of course my question is, why can they do it at all? There is a rule in tort that the tort feasor takes the victim as he finds them. Meaning, too bad if you happen to cripple someone who already had a bad back - if your act is what crippled the victim (the proximate cause).
The original trauma and fighting legally for justice often does destroy the individual plaintiff(s) but we all know,the things an individual does at great personal cost may change the collective reality for the better.
But this telling and insisting on justice should not be viewed as a heroic sacrifice on the part of the victims, a la the christ on the cross romantic notion of suffering. The heroism is in the choice to be a survivor rather than a victim.
The truth is that the victim has no choice if they are ever, ever to recover but to assert their reality in the face of establishment lies about that reality. (see my comments on the Winter Solstice text box).
3. The case made it easier to do these disputes as a class action instead of as individual lawsuits thus increasing the amount of damages that can be awarded
4. Their description of the survivor's post traumatic shock syndrome confirmed my belief that I have been suffering from this disorder ever since the kittens were shot and that the police behavior in supporting the cat killer Dombecks instead of myself, deepened and compounded the disorder until it totally disabled me.