Can we take Lizza at his word when he rhetorically asks what company policy he violated?

What I am saying is this: it's not that I don't believe the accusors by default ( you suggest because the accused is liberal). Rather what I am suggesting is that if she had a case against him, I would have less skepticism if she went to the police first instead of just trying to get him fired from his job.

I wonder what the accused has to lose by not revealing more information about what happened to the public.

;1208833']
There is (rightfully) a whole lot of stuff you can do that can get you fired from a job (including sexual impropriety) that's not illegal. I'm not sure where you're going with this.

;1208835']Privacy and dignity. What does she have to gain? Convincing Reverend Jones that she really was victimized? If the HR case was resolved to her satisfaction, why would she care?

Also it's a bad idea to sue your employer for firing you if you ever want to get hired again by anybody, or so I heard on hacker news.

[...]

A few weeks after that day on set, Fraser calls me. There's something he wants to tell me that he couldn't quite bring himself to relate in London or New York. He's sorry about that, he says—that he didn't have “the courage to speak up for risk of humiliation, or damage to my career.”

Certain pieces of what he tells me have already been told, it turns out—but this is the first time he's ever spoken publicly about any of it. The story he wants to relay took place, he says, in the summer of 2003, in the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a luncheon held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that hosts the Golden Globes. On Fraser's way out of the hotel, he was hailed by Philip Berk, a former president of the HFPA. In the midst of a crowded room, Berk reached out to shake Fraser's hand. Much of what happened next Berk recounted in his memoir and was also reported by Sharon Waxman in The New York Times: He pinched Fraser's ass—in jest, according to Berk. But Fraser says what Berk did was more than a pinch: “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.” Fraser says that in this moment he was overcome with panic and fear.

Fraser eventually was able, he says, to remove Berk's hand. “I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry.” He rushed out of the room, outside, past a police officer he couldn't quite bring himself to confess to, and then home, where he told his then wife, Afton, what had happened. “I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me,” he says now. (In an e-mail, Berk, who is still an HFPA member, disputed Fraser's account: “Mr. Fraser's version is a total fabrication.”)

In the aftermath of the encounter, Fraser thought about making it public. But ultimately, “I didn't want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative.” But the memory of what had happened, and the way it made him feel, stuck with him. His reps asked the HFPA for a written apology. Berk acknowledges that he wrote a letter to Fraser about the incident but says, “My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual ‘If I've done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologize.’ ”

According to Fraser, the HFPA also said it would never allow Berk in a room with Fraser again. (Berk denies this, and the HFPA declined to comment for this story.) But still, Fraser says, “I became depressed.” He started telling himself he deserved what had happened to him. “I was blaming myself and I was miserable—because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel.’ That summer wore on—and I can't remember what I went on to work on next.”

He knows now that people wonder what happened to Brendan Fraser, how he went from a highly visible public figure to practically disappearing in the public mind, and he'd already told me most of it. But this, he says, is the final piece. The experience, he says, “made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive.” He wondered if the HFPA had blacklisted him. “I don't know if this curried disfavor with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening.” Fraser says he was rarely invited back to the Globes after 2003. Berk denies that the HFPA retaliated against Fraser: “His career declined through no fault of ours.”

Fraser says the experience messed with his sense of “who I was and what I was doing.” Work, he says, “withered on the vine for me. In my mind, at least, something had been taken away from me.” This past fall, he watched other people come forward to talk about similar experiences, he says. “I know Rose [McGowan], I know Ashley [Judd], I know Mira [Sorvino]—I've worked with them. I call them friends in my mind. I haven't spoken to them in years, but they're my friends. I watched this wonderful movement, these people with the courage to say what I didn't have the courage to say.”

He was in a hotel room just weeks ago, watching the Globes on TV, Fraser says, as the actresses wore black and the actors wore Time's Up pins in solidarity, when the broadcast showed Berk in the room. He was there and Fraser was not.

“Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely.”

On the phone, he breathes deeply. “And maybe I am over-reacting in terms of what the instance was. I just know what my truth is. And it's what I just spoke to you.”

[...]