When Love Letters Become Hated Mail

At first, Kerry Ellison considered Sterling Gray an amiable pest. A fellow agent in the Internal Revenue Service's San Mateo, Calif., office, Gray, 45 and a married man, would often interrupt Ellison, 31, as she talked with colleagues. He also asked her out for lunch and drinks and would not be put off by her refusals. Then, in October 1986, he handed Ellison a note: "I cried over you all last night, and I'm totally drained today . . ."

Ellison, unsure about her rights, did not formally lodge a complaint at the time. A few days later, she traveled to St. Louis for tax-law training. Although Ellison told few people where she was going, a three-page letter from Gray arrived in her hotel room. ("Some people seek the woman, I seek the child inside. With gentleness and deepest respect, Sterling.") Ellison filed a sexual-harassment petition with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was eventually rejected because the love letters did not appear to violate any existing guidelines on sexual harassment.

Ellison took her case to court. "People who don't understand sexual harassment trivialize it," she says. Although the law traditionally examines behavior from the viewpoint of a "reasonable person," the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco expanded that standard when it agreed last January that the situation merited a trial. The court acknowledged that a "reasonable woman" could view Gray's letters differently than a man would and feel threatened by them. This new standard, wrote the three-judge panel, "does not establish a higher level of protection for women . . . Instead, a gender-conscious examination of sexual harassment will enable women to participate in the workplace on an equal footing." Ellison's complaint goes to trial next year.