We Shouldn't Forget

Jamie Leigh Jones

According to Jones, just four days after she arrived in Baghdad, she joined a small group of Halliburton firefighters outside the KBR barracks. One gave her a drink. She took two sips, after which she can recall nothing. In legal filings and congressional testimony, Jones describes waking up the next morning "still affected by the drug," and discovering "her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery."

According to Jones, a rape kit was administered at an Army-run hospital. The rape kit was then handed over to KBR, and since then bits of it have disappeared as it came into the custody of various agencies until reaching its current resting place with the U.S. Department of State. Jones also alleges that after her rape-kit procedure was performed, KBR placed her under armed guard in a shipping container for at least 24 hours and refused to let her eat, drink, or call her family. For reasons that have never been entirely clear, the Department of Justice declined to investigate. Jones eventually refused to arbitrate this case in a private forum in which Halliburton paid for the arbitrator and in which there was no right to appeal.

She sued in federal court in 2007, and in September, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision allowing Jones to press some of her claims in civil court as opposed to private arbitration. Because her assault was not connected to her employment, the court said, it was not subject to the mandatory arbitration clause she had signed.

Last week KBR/Halliburton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse this ruling. In its petition—which accuses Jones of being dishonest as well as a publicity seeker—KBR gives a whole new meaning to the politics of blaming the victim. As Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones pointed out Monday, KBR isn't above accusing Jamie Leigh Jones of being a liar who has "has gone to great lengths to sensationalize her allegations against the KBR Defendants in the media, before the courts, and before Congress."

Evidently KBR is still smarting from Sen. Al Franken's amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which withholds defense contracts from companies that "restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." That measure passed the Senate in December, with 30 Republicans voting against it. President Obama signed it into law.

Those same 30 male Republican senators who voted against the Franken amendment learned the hard way that it's never smart politics to try to lock Jamie Leigh Jones in a closet. They were mystified by the blowback last fall. David Vitter of Louisiana, for example, was confronted at a town hall meeting by a devastated rape victim. (Vitter blamed President Obama and walked away). John Thune of South Dakota tried to say the Franken amendment was a "politically inspired amendment" that aimed to do away with arbitration in labor agreements. Then John Cornyn of Texas whined about how the evil Franken was "trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape—and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues." It takes a special kind of narcissist to say a victim of gang rape isn't suffering as much as the embarrassed senators who voted against her.

Read the rest of Dahlia Lithwick's righteous piece.

(h/t: Steve Benen)