Karen Kraushaar - Harassment Claims

Yesterday, at Herman Cain's press conference, reporters seemed to enjoy the fact that another woman, Karen Kraushaar, had come forward and was willing to talk.

A second woman agreed to go public. Big stuff.

Perhaps Karen Kraushaar should have remained anonymous.

AP has this exclusive:

Accuser filed complaint in next job

A woman who settled a sexual harassment complaint against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain in 1999 complained three years later at her next job about unfair treatment, saying she should be allowed to work from home after a serious car accident and accusing a manager of circulating a sexually charged email, The Associated Press has learned.

Karen Kraushaar, 55, filed the complaint while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Justice Department in late 2002 or early 2003, with the assistance of her lawyer, Joel Bennett, who also handled her earlier sexual harassment complaint against Cain in 1999. Three former supervisors familiar with Kraushaar's complaint, which did not include a claim of sexual harassment, described it for the AP under condition of anonymity because the matter was handled internally by the agency and was not public.

To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Kraushaar told the AP she considered her employment complaint "relatively minor" and she later dropped it.

"The concern was that there may have been discrimination on the job and that I was being treated unfairly," Kraushaar said.

Kraushaar said Tuesday she did not remember details about the complaint and did not remember asking for a payment, a promotion or a Harvard fellowship. Bennett, her lawyer, declined to discuss the case with the AP, saying he considered it confidential. Kraushaar left her job at the immigration service after dropping the complaint in 2003, and she went to work at the Treasury Department.

Details of the workplace complaint that Kraushaar made at the immigration service are relevant because they could offer insights into how she responded to conflicts at work.

Kraushaar's pattern of filing harassment complaints certainly is significant.

She demands thousands of dollars to settle.

...Kraushaar's complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.

The complaint also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because "in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on." Women were like computers because "even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval."

Kraushaar told the AP that she remembered the complaint focusing on supervisors denying her the opportunity to work from home after her car accident. She said other employees were allowed to work from home.

In Kraushaar's complaint, she mentioned she was troubled by a "sexually explicit" joke circulating on the Internet, comparing men and women to computers.

Good grief. While she apparently didn't charge supervisors at the immigration service with sexual harassment specifically, she did include her objections to a lame Internet joke in her complaint. She was offended.

Kraushaar and her a lawyer, Joel Bennett, probably tossed that in there, hoping something would stick. Alas, the duo were unsuccessful. She dropped the matter.

It appears that when Kraushaar has a beef with an employer, she responds by getting her go-to-guy Bennett to file a harassment complaint. Filing a frivilous complaint and demanding thousands of dollars from her employer doesn't exactly boost her credibility.

She calls Herman Cain a "serial denier."

It appears that she may be a "serial accuser."