Forced arbitration has silenced too many survivors of sexual assault

In August 2018, a supervisor at a major insurance company forced his way into my hotel room while we were at a conference and raped me.

The trip had started out well. I loved my job and my company, where I had worked as an independent contractor for nearly eight years. If you had asked me, I would have told you that I wanted to spend the rest of my career working there. On this particular evening, I was out with coworkers, whom I knew and trusted. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, until I was suddenly very sick. My colleagues helped me to my hotel room because I could barely walk. I was incoherent, but once I was back in my room, I was able to call my husband. I grew sicker and sicker and passed in and out of consciousness.

In retrospect, I believe that I was drugged.

Sometime after midnight, a knock came at my door. Despite my illness, my first thought was that something was very wrong for someone to be disturbing me at that very late hour. When I opened the door, I saw a man I knew, a trusted colleague. Never did I think that I was in any kind of danger.

He pushed his way in, asked to use the bathroom, and, when he was done, physically attacked me. I repeatedly asked him to leave, but he refused. Then, he raped me.

The next morning, still in shock, I went to the hospital and asked for a rape kit. I spoke to the police and reported the assault. The whole process took more than eight hours and it was the start of a long journey, one that changed my life, changed me as a person, and put me in a fight that I could never have imagined I would ever be in.

Despite my long tenure at this company, I was an independent contractor and my rapist was a high-level executive. There were many advantages to being an independent contractor, but I feared that reporting him would put me in a precarious position and potentially ruin my career.

As a 1099 independent contractor, I not only reported to other 1099s but also to W-2s of the company above me. The person who assaulted me was a W-2 who was much higher up in the company and directly influenced my position. I knew that reporting him would put me at the mercy of my bosses, which was a scary position to be in, especially as a 1099. After hours of being sick, in and out of consciousness, and truly trying to decide what to do while still in shock, I began to make phone calls to my husband and my bosses to report the assault. I eventually chose to call a senior woman at the company (thinking it would be safer to speak to a female) to tell her what had happened. Her words stunned me.

“Katie, you have two choices,” she said. “You either say something or you don’t. If you say something, your career is likely over. If you don’t, well, everybody has dark secrets.”

I felt sick. In so many words, she was urging me to keep my mouth shut.

I quickly found out the lengths to which this company would go to silence me and protect my predator.

From the start, the company was less than helpful with the police investigation. My rapist flew home and the company confiscated his work phone, delaying questioning. My bosses told my rapist that they would be able to bring him back if he were willing to resign until everything blew over. Even after he separated from the company, they gave him and his wife an all-expenses-paid trip. (The company declined to comment.)

Most importantly, the company was initially able to keep all these facts from seeing the light of day because, years earlier during the onboarding process, I had signed an arbitration agreement that forced me to adjudicate all these claims secretly. I was also bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Like most people, I had no idea how far-reaching these provisions went in preventing survivors from discussing anything that happens to them with anyone, no matter how awful.

Seeing my rapist held accountable in a court of law—having him held accountable publicly for what he did to me—was the only thing that kept me going, and getting into that courtroom was the only way I would be able to speak of any of what had happened to me.

Most lawyers would not take my case because of the forced arbitration agreement I had signed. They told me getting my case before a jury was impossible. The best I could hope for was to adjudicate it in arbitration, where there would be no public record. No one would ever know about what happened to me and why I suddenly left the company where I had loved working. If my rapist were brought back to the company, as he had been promised, he could theoretically prey on other women again, with no one being the wiser.

This horrific situation went on for years, until the day I learned that Congress had passed a law called the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA). This far-reaching law bans forced arbitration of sexual misconduct claims not just for W-2 workers, but for independent contractors like me—and those who work in the gig industry that is so prevalent today.

The EFAA, spearheaded by Lift Our Voices and its cofounders Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, supported my efforts to move forward in court and out of arbitration, which allowed me to sue my rapist in federal court. Getting into that courtroom was everything to me and to my family. It was also terrifying, hard, and every minute of it hurt again. Hearing witness testimony was horrible. Being in the same room with my rapist for the first time in five years was awful. But it was the most important thing I have ever done.

During jury selection, the judge asked members of the jury pool to raise their hands if they or someone close to them had been sexually assaulted. The number of hands that went up was shocking. When those jurors had to explain to the judge what happened, many of them cried in the jury box, as they had to relive their own traumas, or the traumas faced by their mothers, sisters, or daughters. Given how prevalent silencing mechanisms are, I wondered if this was the first time some of them were able to talk about what happened.

This is the awful cost of silencing American workers.

I am only allowed to speak on what has been made public record and what has come to light in that civil jury trial against my rapist. I am thankful to finally be able to use my voice to stand up for myself and to speak out for women who need to know what the EFAA does for them moving forward.

Forced arbitration agreements and NDAs are in place to silence workers, whether they are W-2 wage earners, volunteers, or independent contractors, like I was. The EFAA is a critical step in ensuring that we create a more respectful workplace, where survivors are not penalized for coming forward and sexual predators are not rewarded for their despicable behavior.

Lift Our Voices (LOV) was launched in December 2019 to create positive, systemic change in American workplaces through the eradication of nondisclosure agreements for toxic work issues and mandatory arbitration clauses. Since then, LOV has spearheaded two federal landmark laws—The Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act and The Speak Out Act—that eliminate silencing mechanisms for workers who’ve experienced harassment and sexual misconduct on the job.

Follow #LOVJustice on X and visit Lift Our Voices’s website to hear more from Katie and dozens of other survivors who were able to pursue justice in court because of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act.