Law Office Stories--Sex

	Mars symbol (U+2642 ♂). The symbol for a male organism or man.
	Venus symbol (U+2640 ♀). The symbol for a female organism or woman.		Warning: a sensitive reader might be put off by this posting because it’s raunchy. Others, I hope, will laugh.       I represented a police officer who had been fired for unbecoming conduct.  He had had an affair with a citizen, and spent some of his lunch breaks (which, for his shift, were around midnight) at her apartment. He never signed off duty at the time, although he was entitled to do, so that he wouldn't miss any calls, since he patrolled in a remote area where he was the only guy on call. Later the woman changed her mind about him, filed a complaint about his wasting taxpayer money, and took up with another officer.(Some said that she was a “Badge bunny.”) When he was fired,the State Criminal Justice Training Commission revoked his basic law enforcement officer’s license and we appealed to Court. The opposing attorney called the officer “A rotten apple” who could contaminate a whole profession. The judge was deeply offended by the name-calling. “Isn’t the sex part just a red herring?” he asked the attorney. “Why was it any different than if, instead, he’d gone fishing?”  The judge restored the officer’s license,”  and that day, Jerry said that I was the attorney who had made the nooner legal.      LL was the victim of sex harassment. She was a feminine-looking  petite blonde  who was also a lesbian. Her boss didn’t know that, and made overt passes at her. Once, on a business call, he pulled his truck over to the side of the road and attempted to grope her. She quit the job, and we sued.  When we finally got a settlement offer, it exceeded $100,000 and we took it. We also booked the party room operated by one of our clients, a chef-caterer, and had LL invite her friends, all female couples. During the evening, the caterer came out from the kitchen and whispered to my business partner, Duncan, “What do you think about all these dykes?” Duncan answered, “As I see it, they’re just women who like to eat pussy, and I sure don’t see anything wrong with that!” The caterer looked stunned. “Oh yeah,” he said, and was next seen sitting at the guest tables, tossing back drinks  and having a great time with them.      John L. was a truck driver who spent long, lonely (bit evidently not too lonely) hours on the road. He found a community to belong to, a group of horse riders out of Ellensburg, WA. He and his horse appeared in the Kevin Costner movie, “The Postman,” because his horse wasn’t afraid of the movie pyrotechnics.  Just as a make-up artist was about to dye his hair dark, the director said “No!” His grizzled gray was perfect as was.      But one day a horse owner asked John to hold a horse on the right side while he saddled it from the left, and failed to tell John that the horse was an unbroken colt. The horse, seeing movements on both sides of its head at once, panicked and kicked John in the shin with enough force to sever the bone just below the knee. After the bone was set, the wound got infected. John was confined to his house on home IV until he’d recovered.      In the course of defending the case, the insurance attorney took John’s sworn statement (“deposition.”) He asked about John’s family: “Do you have any children?” “Yes, three daughters.” “What are their names, and what years were they born?” John stated the names of each, and in each case, said “1974.” “Are they triplets?” “Nope.” “Twins and one more?” “Nope.” He’d fathered children by three different women in a single year.      Next the attorney asked how having his leg broken affected John’s life. John thought about it for a minute, then said, “It’s hard to get laid when you’re on crutches.” The case settled, and at the time, brought the largest reported settlement in the State for a recreational horse-related injury.             Duncan was representing “Leo, ” a married man with children,  in a business case. While that case was pending, Leo came to the office in excitement, waving a sheaf of papers. A woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand 12 years previously was making a claim for child support. Leo submitted to a DNA test, and Duncan read him the results:  99% positive. So Leo added a son to his family.       Tracy D’s husband had a similar experience.  He was faced with a demand from a woman he’d been acquainted with in the past, his boss’s daughter. He adamantly denied paternity.  He claimed that he found the woman repulsive. We set about answering a questionnaire from the County Office of Support Enforcement. I prodded him a little bit. “Do you want to say you deny paternity, or do you want to check the box that says you don’t know?”  Reluctantly, he said, “I guess we better mark ‘don’t know.’” Again, the results came back over 90% positive. “Where do we go from here?” Tracy and her husband wanted to know.  “Well, we could challenge the validity of the test….” “Never mind,” Tracy sighed, pointing to her husband. “We saw pictures of the child, and it looks just like him.” Tracy was gracious about it, and her children were thrilled. “Guess what? We have a big brother!”      RH was a businessman who converted small old apartment complexes into condominiums.  He set up each project as a separate business entity and brought in partners to fund each. He met a woman at a party who wanted to become involved, but she didn’t have cash to invest, so he agreed that she could work for her percentage. At first, they got along intimately well, but then she became alarmed when she realized that the project could take months before she got any pay-off. She alleged that she had been a mere employee, not an owner, and that he had fired her when she terminated their sex. (Actually, her own emails indicated that she had quit for other reasons.) He offered her $100,000 dollars to release her interest in the project and to get out of his life forever. Instead, she hired an aggressive lawyer to sue, and RH told her, angrily, that he would spend every penny he had to resist her claim.      It was time for his video deposition, so we prepared extensively. We hired a consultant on video deps who counseled him which blue suit and necktie with red in it to wear, how to fold his together and relax them on the table in front of him,  and how to look into the camera as he spoke, rather than at the attorney posing questions to him.       After the consultant left the office, I drilled him on what questions to expect. “ I won’t put words in your mouth, but think of how you are going to phrase your answers,” I told him. “You could say that you had sex, or that you were intimate friends, or whatever, but a jury could see this tape, so just don’t say that you boinked her or something like that.”      So the day of the dep, he was asked if he had had a sexual relationship with the plaintiff. “Oh, I boinked her a couple of times,” he said  very pleasantly, on tape.      Robert very reluctantly settled the case at mediation, but for not a penny more than he had offered in the first place. After she subtracted her costs (filing fee, process server’s fees, court reporter’s fees, videographer’s fees, photocopy fees for tons of business records on all his projects, but the judge let her have them) and her attorney’s share (probably somewhere between 33 and 50%), she had lost a year and at least 40 percent of the original offer.      And finally, back to Leo, more than a decade later. Leo and his wife had split up, and his new girlfriend was pregnant. Leo was prepared to concede paternity, but thought he might as well require a DNA test just in case. I had just retired, but my paralegal assistant John Powers was working for Jean Jorgensen, who took over some of my cases. John took Leo’s call. “Jesus Christ, man, you should get clipped!” he exclaimed.      Jean was horrified. “You can’t talk to a client like that!” But it was language that Leo would understand.