The offended assistant's sexual harrassment claim was thrown out yesterday, with the California Supreme Court upholding a lower court decision.
Lyle, allegedly a slow typist who often missed the jokes she was hired to transcribe (and who, incidentally, was fired after four months for those very reasons), claimed that her performance was hampered by the hostile work environment. The California Supreme Court, however, decided that it wasn't a hostile work environment at all.
Because "Friends" was an "adult-oriented comedy show featuring sexual themes," Lyle should have expected coarse language from writers producing jokes and scripts for the show, the Supreme Court held in its ruling.
While the Fair Employment and Housing Act prohibits conduct that creates a hostile or abusive workplace for women, it does not outlaw "sexually coarse and vulgar language that merely offends," the high court said.
The case raised questions of how far TV comedy writers can go in pushing the boundaries of taste in their private joke-writing sessions, with supporters of the writers and producers arguing that Lyle's suit infringed on their freedom of speech.
Now all Lyle is presumably left with are some hefty legal bills, poor typing skills, no sense of humor and the promise that she'll "never work in this town again." Guess no one ever told her life was gonna be this way......
Wow. You get hired by a group of comedy writers and then are offended when they make jokes. This is so stupid I don't know if I can rationalize it at all..
We live a litigious society motivated by lawyers. Somebody egged her on to file this suit for a payday. Turns out the only ones that got paid were the attorneys. How do you know all lawyers are circumsized? They'll take ten percent off of anything. (more like 30)
she deserves everything she got and more. I hate it when people who can't do their job right bitch and moan about gettting fired; let alone when they take you to court for firing them for said reason.
Rahodeb
Los Angeles, CA
March 2006
APR 21, 2006 07:40 AM