It turns out that the large law firm that employed Fox News legal analyst Mercedes Colwin was quite unhappy with her on-air accusation that sexual harassment is very rare and that most women who allege it are liars.
You may recall that last Thursday, Colwin teamed up with Sean Hannity to suggest that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s accusers were lying:
COLWIN: I used to work in sex crimes in the DA’s office, it was very pitiful to see that because some jurors don’t believe it because they’ve gone, in their own lives there are people who have made these accusations for money. You see this time and time and time again. And sexual harassment that term is coined everywhere. Frankly the laws are very clear as to what it takes in order to be a violation of the law. You have to have some sort of damage. And these individuals, a lot of these women, it’s all about money. And they bank on the fact that these corporations have a reputation that they want to save.
HANNITY: And this is where you thread the needle because there are victims of predators.
COLWIN: There are, there are. But very few, far between.
As Slate’s Jordan Weissmann noted, “Colwin is not some small-time lawyer with her own shingle. She’s a boss at Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, one of the country’s largest law firms, where she serves as the New York office’s managing partner.” As I wrote in my post about Colwin’s comments, her bio states that she “regularly defends corporate executives from Fortune 500 companies accused of wrongdoing including claims of sexual misconduct.”
Apparently, her firm did not look kindly on Colwin’s remarks. Weissman reported the following statement from managing partner Don Comino:
[Gordon Rees] in no way endorses or agrees with any statements which could even remotely be interpreted as minimizing or trivializing the seriousness and gravity of sexual harassment or similarly predatory behaviors, and we renounce them in the strongest possible terms –in fact, contrary to what may have been inferred from what was said during the telecast, the sad reality is that the number of women who likely have not been exposed to such repugnant conduct over the course of their personal or professional lives is, unfortunately, few and far between.
Colwin has issued a series of statements somewhat walking back her remarks, including:
I did not mean to imply nor do I believe, that the victims of sexual assault within society at large are "very few and far between". (7)
— Mercedes Colwin (@MercedesColwin) November 12, 2017
However, Weissman also noted that Colwin will still be a partner in the firm “where she will presumably continue to make money defending accused predators.”
Watch Colwin say that true victims of sexual assault are “very few, far between” below, from the November 9, 2017 Hannity, via Media Matters.