ThePopTort

Hockey’s Smash Hit

Admittedly, it’s not exactly like watching someone get thrown to the lions, but I think we all need to acknowledge that watching today’s most popular sports means witnessing the slow disintegration of athletes' brains.

It was only a matter of time before a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against the NHL alleging the same kinds of brain injuries (plus opiate addiction), that have led about 4,200 American football players to sue the NFL. It is now being reported that,

The family of Derek Boogaard has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the National Hockey League. It contends that the N.H.L. is responsible for the physical trauma and brain damage that Boogaard sustained during six seasons as one of the league’s top enforcers, and for the addiction to prescription painkillers that marked his final two years.

Boogaard was under contract to the Rangers when he was found dead of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers and alcohol on May 13, 2011. He was 28. He was posthumously found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.

“To distill this to one sentence,” said William Gibbs, a lawyer for the Boogaards, “you take a young man, you subject him to trauma, you give him pills for that trauma, he becomes addicted to those pills, you promise to treat him for that addiction, and you fail.”

The N.H.L., through a spokesman, declined to comment Sunday.

Soccer players may have it even worse. It was reported late last year that “even [soccer players] who have never experienced a concussion still have changes in the white matter of their brains, likely from routine and unprotected headers.” In other words, “even blows to the head that aren’t considered concussions may lead to traumatic brain injury.”

While concussions have long been a part of professional sports such as boxing and football, researchers are still struggling to define concussions clinically, and research into brain changes resulting from repetitive blows to the head is a relatively new area of research. “[Brain damage from repetitive blows] would have tremendous public health implications,” says Dr. Jeffrey Bazarian, an associate professor of emergency medicine at URMC. “If players are damaging their brains, it is a large public health issue because everyone, even at a young age, hits their head like this. But right now we really don’t have enough information.”

Bazarian was not involved with the study, but has also used DTI to assess mild brain injury in high school football and hockey players.

Unfortunately, many high schools seem unwilling to take this problem as seriously as they should. Just last week, there was, “[a]n alarming study about teenage athletes."  Specifically:

Doctors say even light concussions, if untreated, can cause severe harm to the brain like memory loss, major depression and even Alzheimer’s later in life. But now, a new survey released this week shows young players won’t report a concussion, even if they feel the headache and dizziness that could come with a big hit on the field.…Nearly half of the students surveyed said they would not tell their coach if they had concussion symptoms.

And when it comes to womens’ sports, like Lacrosse, there’s another problem. Coaches, it seems, think helmets would make the sport, I dunno, less "beautiful". So, when “two state legislators in lacrosse-crazy Maryland introduced a bill this year to require helmets,” the coaches actually protested.

"The beauty of the girls game is it's a lot more finesse, not bodies slamming and slashing and stick violations," said Peter Bogle, who coaches a co-op team in St. Charles. “My take is once you start with a helmet, girls are going to think, ‘Now I can go harder.’” …

Nonetheless, U.S. Lacrosse is planning to draft technical standards for female protective headgear. That should be done by early 2014, [Ann Carpenetti, managing director of game administration for U.S. Lacrosse] said, allowing sporting goods companies to develop models that, with luck, might be available by 2016.

She added, however, that she expects any new headgear to remain optional for the foreseeable future. “I don't think there's a silver bullet,” she said. “Nobody thinks there's a silver bullet to concussions.”

The Feres Doctrine’s Military Injustice

The nation, it seems, has suddenly woken up to the problem of military sexual assaults against women. Today, on its front page, the New York Times ran part two of a series about the disproportionate trauma faced by female military vets, often exasperated by sexual assaults that occured while in the military.  Departing  Pentagon chief Leon E. Panetta estimated such assaults could number 19,000 a year.  

Today, the Times wrote about the “common pathway to homelessness for women - [that is,] military sexual trauma, or M.S.T., from assaults or harassment during their service, which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.”  And nothing illustrated this crisis better than the Oscar-nominated, award-winning documentary, The Invisible War.  If you haven’t see this film, there are numerous ways to download, watch or screen this extraordinary film today.  And then take action here.

But there is one more thing we must do.  We must change the law, so that sexual assault survivors are no longer prohibited from holding the government legally accountable for its role is allowing this crisis to continue.

Rachel Natelson, Legal Director of Service Women’s Action Network, has a piece in Time magazine called "The Unfairness of the Feres Doctrine," a doctrine that we’ve covered often at ThePopTort.  Basically, the “Feres Doctrine” is a 60-year-old policy that bars U.S. military personnel from suing the government for personal injuries suffered while they are in the armed forces. Even, it turns out, when an epidemic of sexual assaults exists. Writes Nelson:

[F]or Ariana Klay, and other subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War, however, the wounds of battle are unlikely to fade with the closing credits.

In dismissing Klay v Panetta, a civil lawsuit that Klay brought against the Pentagon for failing to protect her and other service members from sexual violence, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has perpetuated a baffling tradition of depriving military personnel of basic civil rights.

Like countless others injured due to the negligence or misconduct of their brothers-in-arms, Klay and her co-plaintiffs have been denied a remedy for the wrongs they suffered, simply because they were harmed during their time in uniform.

Congress can fix this. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Al Franken (D-MN), Congress already fixed a related problem by prohibiting military contractors from covering sexual assaults in its forced arbitration clauses. 

They can do this.  

Get Out of our Bodies, Johnson & Johnson

Yesterday, a New Jersey jury ruled in the first of about 1,800 vaginal mesh cases pending in that state against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Ethicon.  The jury could not have been more clear: $3.35 to a South Dakota nurse, who was surgically implanted with a Gynecare Prolift vaginal mesh.  This device injured her so severely that she’s already undergone 18 operations to try to repair the damage. From our earlier coverage of vaginal meshes: 

The FDA approved surgical meshes for procedures like abdominal surgery.  But J&J began marketing them for use in a women’s vaginal area, treating problems like incontinence.  Subsequently, hundreds of women became severely injured and some died as the meshes began disintegrating, growing into tissue and becoming impossible to remove.

Meanwhile, the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed last Friday that the United States attorney’s office in Massachusetts and the civil division of the Justice Department are investigating J&J's marketing of its its ASR hip replacements.  That’s the Frankensteinian device that J&J finally recalled in 2010 even though it apparently knew the device was failing and releasing high levels of metallic ions, and which it is now defending in a bunch of lawsuits. See some of our previous coverage here. 

And also last Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it has “notified healthcare professionals of a Class I recall, the most serious type,” of J&J’s LPS Diaphyseal Sleeve, used in reconstructive knee surgery.  Apparently, says the FDA, this device as the “potential for fractures” and the FDA has already received 10 reports of the device malfunctioning: 

A fracture in the sleeve at the joint of it could lead to loss of function or loss of limb, infection, compromised soft tissue or death, the FDA said.

From now on, Johnson & Johnson needs to stick to cotton swabs.  The outer ear is as far inside the body we would like J&J products to go, thank you very much.

Yet Another DES Lawsuit Settles

Iusticia by Trevor Goring

Women must be truly honored by the amount of attention the pharmaceutical industry pays to them.  The constant marketing push – what a compliment.  The disproportionate number of drugs that turn out to be unsafe causing needless deaths and injuries – what a treat! 

And age is irrelevant. Take the Ortho-Evra Patch, which was marketed to young women with sexy television commercials and fashion runway shows, but which caused blood clots, caused heart attacks and strokes.  Or take synthetic hormones, often marketed to women experiencing menopause.  In the 1960s, a popular new book by an industry-funded doctor called Feminine Forever argued that such women are “castrate,” “the equivalent of a eunuch,” but lucky for them, estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) could fix all that.  Not mentioned was evidence since the 1930s and 1940s that ERT caused cancer. It took until 2002 for NIH researchers to finally confirm a significant increase in the risk of breast cancer, heart attacks, blood clots and strokes from ERT.  See all of this explored in much more detail in the Center for Justice & Democracy’s report, The Bitterest Pill.

Speaking of hormones, DES was a synthetic estrogen approved by the FDA to prevent miscarriages and widely prescribed to women from the 1940s through the 1960s.  DES did not work but instead caused cancer, infertility and other serious physical problems for the women who took it, and even more extensively, the children they carried who were exposed pre-natally.  For almost two decades after the drug was proven ineffective, manufacturers continued to push the drug and expose hundreds of thousands of women and their offspring to risk.  It was finally banned in 1971.  But until women started bringing lawsuits, many DES exposed women did not know about the risks they faced.

But the lawsuits weren’t so easy.  Many DES claims were declared “time-barred” – in other words, judges penalized women and their children for the latent nature of their injuries, or because they had not learned earlier of health risks that the company had covered-up.  There was also the problem of identifying the correct manufacturer, until the courts developed “concerted action” and “market share” liability theories thanks to pioneering lawyers like our friend, Sybil Shainwald.  So some cases have succeeded, and today we can report that four sisters with breast cancer and other severe reproductive problems in Boston, whose mother took DES, have forced Eli Lilly to settle their claims.  This was after the company vowed to fight them in court, saying, “We believe these claims are without merit and are prepared to defend against them vigorously.”  Until they didn’t.  And there could be more settlements soon:

A total of 51 women, including the Melnick sisters, filed lawsuits in Boston against more than a dozen companies that made or marketed a synthetic estrogen known as DES.

The Melnick sisters’ case was the first to go to trial. The settlement was announced Wednesday on the second day of testimony.

Said one of the sisters, Michele Melnick Fecho, “who was 42 when she became the first sister diagnosed,” 

"I think it's important to be your own advocate … If a woman – a DES daughter – knew this, she could get earlier screening."

Remarkable women.

Our Military: Fighting for the Right to Serve and Live

In her HBO documentary Public Speaking, the brilliant and legendary wit, Fran Liebowitz, has a line that goes something like, “I am stunned that the two greatest desires apparently of people involved in the gay rights movement are gay marriage and gays on the military. Really? To me these are the two most confining institutions on the planet.”

Say what you will, the fight to fight has been a focus not only of the gay rights movement but of the women’s movement, as well.  Last week, a federal lawsuit was filed in California challenging the Defense Department’s “formal exclusion of women from most direct ground combat positions.”

According to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the sweeping restriction based on gender is unconstitutional because it is not justified by a specific governmental objective, as the U.S. Supreme Court has required. Women effectively serve in direct combat, the suit said, often without the level of training provided to their male counterparts or the recognition that would enable them to advance.

“The policy has the effect of closing off whole career fields for women,” said Ariela Migdal, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Women Rights Project. “We demand that the U.S. military bring its policy into line with modern society.”

We certainly hope they win. But we also hope they don’t end up like Vietnam Vet John Shepherd Jr. who, reports the New York Times today, is also suing the military in a class action, “arguing that he and other Vietnam veterans had post-traumatic stress disorder when they were issued other-than-honorable discharges” and is asking that their discharges be upgraded. Here’s what happened to John after enlisting in 1968 and being sent to the Mekong Delta:

Within a month, his patrol was ambushed, and Shepherd responded by tossing a hand grenade into a bunker that killed several enemy soldiers. The Army awarded him a Bronze Star with a valor device, one of its highest decorations.

Yet the honor did little to assuage Shepherd’s sense of anxiousness and futility about the war. A few weeks after his act of heroism, he said, his platoon leader was killed by a sniper as he tried to help Shepherd out of a canal. It was a breaking point: His behavior became erratic, and at some point he simply refused to go on patrol.

“I never felt fear like I felt when he got shot," Shepherd said last week.

After a court-martial, the Army discharged Shepherd under other-than-honorable conditions, then known as an undesirable discharge. At the time, he was happy just to be a civilian again. But he came to rue that discharge, particularly after his claim for veterans benefits was denied because of it.

The lawsuit, which was prepared with the help of Yale law students, “could have a wide impact.”

The Yale team says that its review of records from 2003 to 2012 shows that 154 Vietnam-era veterans petitioned the Army to upgrade discharges because of PTSD, but that only two were successful. Yet the Army Board of Corrections for Military Records granted upgrades nearly half of the time for other cases.

The students estimate that more than a quarter million Vietnam-era veterans were discharged under other-than-honorable conditions, and that thousands of those probably had PTSD. Their suit names as defendants the secretaries for the Army, Air Force and Navy. Vietnam Veterans of America, the veterans service organization, is joining the case as a plaintiff today. Discharges that are other than honorable can make it harder for veterans to find work and also disqualify them for veterans benefits.

The fight to fight shouldn’t be so hard, and then turn into a fight to live, earn a living and get proper care. Our Vets, and the nation, deserve better.

California’s Magic Number Shapes Next Wal-Mart Class Action

Class actions are a vital tool for holding accountable corporations that profit by violating a large number of people.  Emphasis on large number of people.  In other words, if your employer at the local deli withholds wages from you and your fellow “sandwich artists,” you probably don’t have a class action.  In “class action” parlance, that’s called the “numerosity requirement" and usually, the question that worries lawyers is: is the number “large enough”?  Although I should say that by “worry,” I do note that in the view of some (like class action attorney blogger Russell Jackson), this requirement has never gotten the respect it deserves:

As I have lamented in this space before, too many people (courts, lawyers, litigants) treat numerosity as a throw-away requirement.  If there are potentially more than some magic number of claimants (often 40 or 100), some treat numerosity as "established" and can get very upset if a defendant won't concede it.

Whether or not that’s true, one thing’s for sure.  “Large enough” isn’t the only issue to worry about these days. “Too large” has become a front and center concern thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2011 decision, Wal-Mart vs. Dukes (which we last covered here  and here.)  In that case, national discrimination against female Walmart employees created too large a class.  We said then, “there is no longer any financial incentive for massive employers like Wal-Mart to settle with victims and stop pervasive discrimination like this."

OK we admit, that may have been an over-reaction – but only a little one.  Thanks to a federal court decision last Friday, the number of female employees discriminated against by Walmart California is, indeed, just right.  Yippy!  Writes the San Francisco Chronicle:

A statewide discrimination suit against Walmart on behalf of at least 100,000 current and former female employees has survived its first test in federal court, more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a nationwide sex-bias suit against the retail giant.

The California case is an offshoot of the national class action that was filed in San Francisco federal court in 2001 on behalf of as many as 1.6 million Walmart employees. Like the earlier case, this suit accuses the company of systematically discriminating against women - who, according to the plaintiffs' experts, were paid less than men and promoted less often.…

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled Friday that the high court had not foreclosed state or regional class actions against Walmart if workers could show they were victims of a uniform policy of discrimination.

He cited the plaintiffs' claims that all California store managers are required to attend training sessions where they are cautioned that women may not be qualified for promotion. Those allegations, if proven, would help to show a "culture and philosophy of gender bias," Breyer said.

More from Bloomberg, here.  So Walmart, numerosity requirement?  Check.  Next stop February, when Judge Breyer will decide if the class will be certified.  We'll keep you posted!

Medical Malpractice and Congressional Fairy Tales

Would you believe that there's been a recent flood of Snow White movies, with not one but two coming soon to theaters near you?  There’s Snow White and the Huntsman with Charlize Theron as the evil queen.  And there’s Mirror Mirror starring Julia Roberts as the evil queen.  That title, of course, references her famous magic mirror, to whom she constantly asks, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”  And the mirror always lies and says, "You, my queen, are fairest of all."  This goes on for awhile, but eventually, the mirror tells the truth and things don’t end up too well for the queen.  House leadership, take note.

For some reason, the House leadership has suddenly decided to push for a vote on H.R. 5, the anti-patient (and anti-women) medical malpractice/drug and medical device/nursing home bill.  The bill’s biggest proponent who keeps egging this on (the magic mirror himself!) was a malpracticing doctor.  That should tell you something.   You can follow the process today, including the introduction of a bunch of amendments, at the House Rules Committee site here. 

I say suddenly because, while the bill was on a very fast track at first, it ran into fierce opposition from some unlikely suspects.  Specifically, Tea Party conservatives.  (See, e.g., here, here )

Now, of course, the likely suspects are also vehemently opposed to the bill.  See, e.g., the consumer and patient group letter sent to Congress yesterday which explains why the bill is anti-patient and especially anti-women.  But I can’t say that the House leadership cares too much about them, or about women, or nursing home patients, or victims of pharmaceutical industry misconduct, or insurance bad faith victims.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be an H.R. 5.

But they are supposed to care about the Constitution.  So right now, a lot of folks in the conservative base are telling the House leadership to throw away those magic mirrors and get a reality check.  We shall see.

The War on Women's Reproductive Health -- Even Justice Isn't Safe

It's not really the best time to be a woman in America.

After all, if you’re like the 99 % of sexually active women in the U.S. who use contraceptives, you're probably aware that using birth control puts you at risk for being called a slut and a prostitute on national radio.  (Though it’s nice to know that since Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke he’s lost 49 of his advertisers and counting.) 

But Rush clearly isn't alone in his desire to undermine women’s health.  

We all remember back in February when U.S. Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Eleanor Holmes Norton walked out of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing because there were no women included on the panel of witnesses discussing limiting contraception for women.  “Where are the women?” asked Maloney before walking out.  She had asked that Sandra Fluke testify at that hearing, but Fluke was rejected because Fluke wasn’t qualified to talk about “religious liberty,” as opposed to, say, her liberty as a human being to control her own body, I suppose.

It’s little wonder that women’s rights are coming under attack in America.  At the federal level one of the largest attacks is on Title X, the nation’s family planning program, signed into law by President Nixon in 1970.  While some Title X money goes towards birth control – which is clearly what some people have a problem with - it also, "provides money for cervical and breast cancer screening, testing for H.I.V and other sexually transmitted diseases, adolescent abstinence counseling, infertility counseling and other services."  It does not fund abortions.  However, current federal legislation seeks to completely defund Title X -- leaving the 5 million low-income people who rely on it, with no options to protect their own health.

And at the state level it gets even worse.  In addition to state legislatures throughout the country voting to stop funding of important programs like breast cancer screenings (see today’s New York Times article about Texas,) and cutting their family planning budgets until they barely exist, eliminating services for hundreds of thousands of women – now their legal rights are under attack. 

Yesterday, the Arizona State Senate passed a bill that would ban something called “wrongful birth” lawsuits. 

“Wrongful birth” lawsuits arise when “physicians don’t inform pregnant women of prenatal problems that could lead to the decision to have an abortion.”  In other words, this bill would give doctors immunity for failing to give medical information about a patient’s health or the health of her fetus. 

In 2011 a Florida couple won a wrongful birth lawsuit, when their son was born with no arms and only one leg – something that the parents believed should have been noticed on the ultrasound.  The jury agreed and awarded them $4.5 million – money the couple said would greatly assist their son throughout his lifetime – so the family need not rely exclusively on taxpayers to care for their child.  

Despite cases like this, the Arizona bill’s sponsor, Nancy Barto, does not believe that failing to inform a patient of this information constitutes malpractice and says that the bill “will still allow ‘true malpractice suits’ to proceed.”  The bill still has to go to the House, but Arizona is not the first state to consider this type of law, and it won’t be the last.

Kansas lawmakers introduced such a bill in February and the Governor has already agreed to sign it.  Among other things the measures would “shield doctors against lawsuits if they do not inform patients of problems in pregnancies.” 

The following states already prohibit wrongful birth claims:  Idaho, Utah, South Dakota, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.  

The only good news is that women are fighting back by offering amendments that would also insert the government, just as uncomfortably, into a man’s private reproductive health decisions.  Examples include:

• Virginia state Senator Janet Howell who “formally suggested that men should be required to get a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before they could obtain medicine for erectile dysfunction.”
• Oklahoma state Senator Constance Johnson who “proposed that the only place men should ever be allowed to ejaculate is into vaginas.”
• Georgia Representative Yasmin Neal who “suggested an amendment that would ban men from getting vasectomies.”  Neal stated, “It is patently unfair that men can avoid unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgment over such matters is more valid than the judgment of the General Assembly, while women’s ability to decide is constantly up for debate throughout the United States.”

For a great interactive map that shows the most restrictive reproductive health measures in the U.S., check out this link from Think Progress. 

Workin' Woes in Wyoming

Wyoming isn't nicknamed the “Equality State” for nothing. It’s the first state to grant women the right to vote (1869).  The first woman was elected to statewide office there in 1894!  Compare that to the sorry record of a big state like New York.  But I wish I could say the same about the rights of workers in the great state of Equality.   

Today, the New York Times is reporting on a pretty shocking report identifying “Wyoming, with its growing oil, gas and mining industries, [a]s one of the most dangerous places in the United States to work.”

Dr. Timothy Ryan, an epidemiologist, was hired by the state to study this problem and has since quit because of inaction by the state.  His report, issued January 3, says, among other things:

Over the last year I have analyzed 17 years of occupational fatality data (1992-2008), read through fatality case reports, and have spoken with hundreds of employees working for various sized companies in the major industries in Wyoming.  The common theme throughout is the lack of a “culture of safety” in Wyoming. Safety occurs as an afterthought. Greater than 85% of the fatality reports indicate that safety procedures were not followed. …

 Wyoming averaged a fatality every ten days over the last ten years.

What's more, he notes, “Currently, OSHA inspections occur annually in less than 2% of Wyoming establishments. The inspections that do occur are primarily based on known incidents, employee  complaints and those companies with a high level of workmen’s compensation claims.” 

Writes the Times,

The report also noted that Wyoming had the highest workplace fatality rate in the country for all but one year from 2003 through 2008. In 2010, the last year that data was provided, Wyoming’s estimated occupational death rate was three and a half times the national average, the report said. …

To be sure, Wyoming’s oil and gas boom, which began in the 1990s, has drawn thousands of people with high-paying but dangerous jobs. In August, three workers were killed in Converse County after an explosion at an oil storage site. …

Oil and gas rig workers and their families are often itinerant, hold little political clout and fear that reporting safety problems could get them fired, said Laurie Goodman, a Wyoming lobbyist who has worked on occupational safety issues.

As we’ve noted before and is addressed at length in this Center for Justice & Democracy report, because the workers comp system fails to keep employers on any kind of legal "hook" for these conditions, the system itself perpetuates a culture of non-safety. The paper reports,

In 2009, Ms. Goodman and worker advocates tried unsuccessfully to get state lawmakers to pass a bill that would have made it easier for workers to file lawsuits after an accident.

“We have a system where there’s no accountability, where the employer has no incentive to be responsive,” said John Vincent, a former mayor of Riverton, who has represented the families of dead and injured oil and gas workers in his law practice and has worked on the legislative effort. “People are afraid to sue. They won’t report injuries. They’ll just stay at home until they get better.” …

 “It seems like people die out there all the time. They’re leaving wives and children,” Ms. [Natlie] Moss, [whose young husband was killed] said. “What 26-year-old should have to plan a funeral?”

Indeed. 

The Private Hell of Military Contractor Employees

This week, it’s “Mission Accomplished” for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.  No silly, not actual military accomplishments.  (Fool me twice, shame on me, right?)  This has to do with what’s apparently the other mission of these private miliary contractors – to mistreat their workers. 

This week, ProPublica reports that “private contractors injured while working for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan filed a class action lawsuit” against private contracting companies and their insurers for refusing their medical treatment and disability payments.  They say that in order to boost profits, companies like insurers AIG and contractor KBR “routinely lied, cheated and threatened injured workers, while ignoring a federal law requiring compensation for such employees.” (See the earlier investigation by ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times and ABC’s 20/20). 

Hundreds of thousands of civilians working for federal contractors have been deployed to war zones to deliver mail, cook meals and act as security guards for U.S. soldiers and diplomats. As of June 2011, more than 53,000 civilians have filed claims for injuries in the war zones. Almost 2,500 contract employees have been killed, according to figures kept by the Department of Labor, which oversees the system.

And speaking of KBR, this week a federal judge slammed KBR’s revolting attempt to force Jamie Leigh Jones to pay them $2 million in attorneys fees after Jamie failed to win her rape case against one of her KBR co-workers in Iraq.  She lost even though she was unconscious (due to drugs or alchohol, what’s the difference?) during a sexual encounter that her alleged attacker says was “consensual.”  (Sound familiar?)  However, although the judge clearly didn’t want to do it, he was forced by statute to order her to pay KBR $150,000 in court costs.  He stated in his order, “The fact that Jones presented prima facie claims of sexual harassment and hostile work environment highlights the impropriety of an award of attorneys’ fees in this case.”  Of course, the hostile work environment for women at this company could hardly be more clear but the jury never heard about it.  And you wonder why she lost? 

So after assassinating her character and getting away with not having to defend itself for what they put Jamie and other women through (check out the film Hot Coffee for more about Jamie when the DVD comes out in November), KBR and its corporate lawyers now want her to pay them money.  This is reprehensible on so many levels, but we like how Gawker put it:

In July, Jamie Leigh Jones lost her federal civil trial against KBR—one of America's most capable government contractors—when a Houston jury determined that her coworkers had never drugged, raped, and shoved her into a shipping container. Or maybe they had, but she'd been asking for it—you know, like KBR said.

Originally KBR had asked for $2 million from Jones, an IT worker whose claim stemmed from an incident that allegedly took place in Baghdad in 2005 (you can find the complaint here). But the presiding judge dropped attorneys fees from her bill, so now all she owes is $145,073.19—money she reportedly does not have, this being America. (I bet you $145,073 that KBR would quibble over the 19 cents.)...

[This is] the result of KBR taking advantage of its right under the federal Civil Rights Act to collect from Jones. However, the company could have decided against pursuing the costs (because they're already super-loaded), or possibly sought to recoup them from the government (because having taxpayers foot the bill for corporations is how we do business).