Cain Accuser Has A (Brief) History

The plot thickens. Seems that a woman who filed sexual harassment complaint against GOP hopeful Herman Cain also filed a complaint against her next employer.

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 conditions 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. (Source: Yahoo News)

I know this already old news, but I thought I’d post in case you had been away.

So it looks like there might be something developing here that could certainly give Cain a boost. If it turns out this woman has issues with authority or developed a trend to get what she wants through ligation and complaint filing, it could do serious damage to her credibility.

Just take a look at that second paragraph from Yahoo News. She sure didn’t want much did she? Unlike the private sector where it can be cheaper for a company or association to just pay off a compliant, real or imagined, each department in the federal government has a fleet of lawyers to call upon to take on these kinds of complaints. She might have thought that since the National Restaurant Association could be buffaloed why not the federal government. Instead, what she might have gotten was a face full of “shut the heck up.” A little deeper in the story it mentions that she no longer works at the immigration service and has moved to another agency. Probably didn’t feel comfortable showing herself around the office once word got out that she had overstepped.

If the other women have the same sort of track record, it could bode well for Cain. Let us hope so.