STATEMENT OF THOMAS GRAY

I am Thomas Gray, the husband of Marianne Moore. I am an Instructor in the Sociology Department at the University of Iowa. My office is at W120 Seashore Hall. Marianne and I live at 430 Lee Street in Iowa City.
Marianne and I have been married for six years. We have no children, although we have talked about starting a family soon. We met on a blind date when we both worked in the Sociology Department at the University, where I was a graduate student and Marianne was a secretary. Our marriage has generally been a smooth one, although Marianne can be temperamental at times. Marianne has also battled clinical depression much of her adult life. She had a pretty bad six month episode of depression when she was an undergraduate, and another bout just before we got married. She is currently experiencing another episode of depression, brought on by the harassment she received when she worked at the City of Bloomington. Prior to going to work for the City of Bloomington, Marianne never had any problems with any of her other employers.
Marianne began work in the Department of Human Resources for the City of Bloomington shortly after the first of January, 1999. She had been laid off from her previous job in the Sociology Department, when funding ran out. Her work as a secretary in the department was always competent and she received a number of raises and was told by Gerry Hopkins and the other faculty that she worked for that she was one of the best secretaries they had ever had. The allegations in her termination letter that her word processing skills are inadequate are ridiculous. The Sociology Department is standardized on WordPerfect 7.0. It is used in the Institute for Social Research offices, and also by the graduate students who use the network. Marianne did a substantial amount of the work in the final prepa-ration of my dissertation -- editing, reformatting, and retyping much of it using WordPerfect. Therefore, I know from first hand experience that she is an excellent secretary. It is obvious to me that the claim that she was not competent as a secretary was merely an excuse used by the City to fire her for speaking out on sexual harassment issues.
Marianne began work for the City in the first week of January. The job paid approximately $24,000 a year, which was tremendously important to us. My graduate fellowship paid only $10,000. I never really met any of her co-workers or her boss. I went down once in her first or second week to help her move some things because she had badly sprained her ankle from when she fell on the ice, and she needed me to help carry a box of her own office supplies -- dictionaries, photographs, coffee mugs, and so on. While there I met several people for a few minutes. I don't recall whether I ever met William Hunt.
During the first few weeks of her job, Marianne was very excited about it. She liked her co-workers, and talked about how nice it was to work in a larger office. She had been isolated in the Institute for Social Research as the only secretary. She told me she was making friends with the other secretaries. I remember her mentioning the name Elinor, but do not remember any other names in that department. I don't remember any specific details of why she liked it. I was very busy at the time doing the final year of my dissertation.
At the end of January, 1999, my mother died. She had been a heavy smoker and my parents owned a dry cleaning establishment in which she had worked all of her life. She died from lung cancer. We went to the funeral around the first of February, and were gone for three or four days. I know that Marianne missed some time from work because of this, but she told me that she had cleared it with her supervisor. I had been a little concerned whether she could take that much time off in only her first month on the job, but she assured me that her supervisor had said it was okay.
To the best of my recollection, Marianne did not mention Mr. Hunt during her first two months on the job. She did not complain to me about any improper advances or other forms of sexual harassment.
I recall the events in March quite clearly. Marianne and I talked every day about how her work was going and how her day had gone, and she kept me informed of all the events. Essentially, the sequence of events was this: Hunt suggested to her that she was eligible for a major promotion; he told her that in order to qualify for the promotion, she had to go to a weekend training session in Indianapolis, he showed up at that session, pushed his way into her room at night, grabbed her, kissed her, and tried to coerce sex from her by suggesting that she had to go to bed with him to get the promotion. When she refused he started building a file to justify firing her, wrongly accusing her of not being a competent secretary. When she filed a complaint against him with the City, nothing was done. When the story became public in the newspaper, she was fired for it. Because of the stress and anxiety and embarrassment that was caused by all of this, she lapsed into clinical depression, she was unable to find a job, she suffered loss of sleep and migraine headaches, and had to see two different doctors. She looked for months to find a job in Bloomington but was unable to. We believe that City officials were blackballing her. We were forced to move out of State, in order to resume a normal life.
Let me go through the details. In early March, Mr. Hunt told Marianne that there was an opening for an Assistant Director, and that she should apply. He told her that she needed to attend a weekend conference on human resource management in Indianapolis that would require an overnight stay at a hotel. Based on this, Marianne applied for the Assistant Director position and also registered for the weekend session in Indianapolis. I remember this distinctly because she was very excited. She had been stuck in secretarial jobs, but we both knew she was smart enough to be doing something more important. This seemed to be the break she had been waiting for. It also came at just about the same time that Prof. Hopkins, the Director of the Institute for Social Research, told me that there would probably be a permanent position available for me in Bloomington at the Institute if I wanted it. Needless to say, we were very excited about the prospect of being able to put our two careers together and stay in Bloomington. This was the first week of March.
She went to the conference in mid-March. She left early Friday morning, and attended sessions of the conference all day, and then went to dinner with Mr. Hunt and some other people who were involved in Human Resources administration. I distinctly remember her telling me that it was Mr. Hunt who invited her to dinner. We talked on the telephone between 9 and 9:30 p.m. on that Friday night. She had just come back from dinner and she filled me in on the events of the day. At that point, there was nothing that she said that indicated that she had any problems yet with Mr. Hunt. About 45 minutes later, the phone rang again, and it was Marianne. She was crying, and almost hysterical. I could barely make out what she said. She kept saying "it was horrible, it was horrible" and repeated that over and over again. I said what, what happened, are you okay, what happened. Marianne said, "Mr. Hunt attacked me. He grabbed me and attacked me." I told her to call the police. She said no, she was just coming home. I told her don't drive, you're too upset, I will come and get you. She said, "How, I have the car?" I realized she was right. I asked her again if she was okay to drive, and she said yes, she just needed to get out of there as fast as possible. She had calmed down a little bit at this point. We had been talking about five minutes on the phone, and I specifically asked did he rape you? And she said, "No, but I thought he was going to." At that point we hung up, and she drove back to Bloomington and got here maybe an hour and fifteen minutes later. By this point, it was almost midnight. When she came home I again asked her if she were okay or if she needed to see a doctor. She said no, she was fine. She was calmed down at this point and she told me, "Boy was I stupid. I thought they were going to promote me. Hunt just wanted to sleep with me." At that point she took a couple of pills, which I think were tranquilizers, and went to sleep.
It was several days before Marianne could go back to work. She was very upset still. I kept telling her she had to eat or go back to work or quit or file a complaint or do something, that she couldn't just sit at home. She said, "The least that Hunt owes me after this is a few days off. I'm going to take a few days, and let him stew about it. Then maybe I will file a complaint."
After a couple days, she went back to work. Things just got worse. Hunt immediately gave her a negative performance evaluation. I remember seeing the letter which she brought home. It said she had a hostile attitude, poor work performance and things like that. It was obviously made up. It was clear that Hunt was going to fire her because she wouldn't sleep with him. Marianne and I talked about it, and decided she had nothing to loose, so she should go ahead and file a complaint against him. At least that would make it more difficult for him to fire her. Marianne filed a complaint, but then nothing happened. They never took any action on it.
After about a month, a reporter called several times wanting to talk to her about the incident. We don't know how the reporter found out about it. I don't remember the reporter's name, but she worked for The Bloomington Choice, a weekly newspaper. At first, Marianne and I thought that it would not be a good idea to talk to her. But she was persistent, and seemed to know all the facts anyway, and the City obviously wasn't doing anything about the situation, so Marianne talked to the reporter. The reporter came to the house, and interviewed Marianne about the incident in my presence. A few days later the story came out in the Bloomington Choice. That was the first that either of us had heard that Hunt had done this sort of thing before, and that the City was deliberately covering it up. We were shocked. I guess we shouldn't have been so naive.
The day after the newspaper story came out Hunt fired Marianne. Again, he claimed it was because she was inadequate as a secretary and had a bad attitude and was lazy. The reasons were obviously pretextual. She was fired because of the sexual harassment complaint and because she had spoken to the newspaper and embarrassed the City. I know it was embarrassing to the City. Political sociology is one of the things that I study. In the Sociology Department, which is comprised of mostly people who were political supporters of the Mayor and her administration, people were talking about it and about the natural hypocrisy of politicians. Therefore, the Mayor must have know how damaging this story would be to her reputation as a liberal Democrat in a University town, and retaliated against Marianne out of anger.
Over the next few months and into the summer, Marianne went on a hunt for a new job. This was tremendously important to us, because she was bringing in two-thirds of our income. Things were really tight without her income, and we had to borrow money. Luckily, we were able to borrow money from my father. The job hunt was tremendously difficult. Marianne answered want ads and went around town to businesses circulating her resume. No one called her, and she got no interviews. This was amazing to us. She had never had any difficulty finding a job in the past. It is hard for me to estimate how many jobs she applied for, but it was probably around twenty. In mid-summer, we found out the reason. Marianne got an anonymous letter which was obviously from one of the staff people who worked for the City of Bloomington. The letter reported that the Mayor and other city officials and Mr. Hunt had conspired to blackball Marianne and make sure she didn't get a job, to punish her for embarrassing the administration. The letter said that someone in this group had specifically used the phrase, "We are going to run that bitch out of town." Throughout the summer and into the fall, she had no income, and the prospect of our remaining in Bloomington with two jobs all of a sudden seemed dim. I had to start calling in favors and immediately go on the national job market. Luckily, I was able to get an Instructorship at the University of Iowa, so we moved in the summer of YR-1. My Instructorship has just begun and is a two-year contract. It pays $30,000 per year. However, between May 1999 and when I got this job offer a year later, we had very little money, and had to borrow heavily from friends and family.
Throughout this period from May through summer, Marianne suffered migraine headaches, insomnia, stress and anxiety. I would sometimes come home and find that she had been unable to get out of bed that day, because of anxiety and depression. Sometimes I would come home and she would start yelling at me and saying it was my fault. She went to her doctor, who gave her tranquilizers, but they didn't help. They reduced the stress a little, but she was still moody and depressed and developed a kind of fatalistic outlook on the future -- saying she would never find a job, we'd never be able to have children, or panicking over out lack of money.
Finally towards the end of the summer or early fall, 1999, she went to see a psychiatrist. The therapist was a doctor named Elizabeth Coatsworth. She put her on anti-depression medicine. Marianne also started going to weekly counseling sessions, but they cost money which we didn't have, so she was not able to go as often as the doctor thought she should.
I would estimate during this period from May 1999 to May 2000 that Marianne suffered from one to two debilitating migraine headaches a week. These headaches would cause her to lie down and be unable to eat or get up. They would last sometimes for three or four hours. Also, I would estimate that neither one of us got a full good night's sleep during this entire year. Marianne's typical sleep pattern was that she would toss and turn for an hour or so after we went to bed. She would sleep for about three hours, but wake up between 2:00 and 2:30. She would be unable to sleep very much the rest of the night. She would get up and watch television or read, and then get back into bed about 4:00 o'clock. From 4:00 until 6:30 she would sleep lightly, tossing and turning a lot, getting up and going to the bathroom. All of this would wake me up so that I didn't get much sleep either.
She now has a couple of job prospects in Iowa City, and the headaches and insomnia have gotten better and our interactions with each other are more normal. She has made arrangements to see a new therapist for depression caused by this whole incident, and I do not know how much longer she will have to continue.