DALLAS — More than a dozen Army officials have been fired or suspended as part of a sweeping investigation into the climate and culture at Fort Hood, a sprawling military base in Texas that has been rocked by a series of violent deaths, suicides and complaints of sexual harassment.
The investigation released on Tuesday found “major flaws” at Fort Hood and a command climate “that was permissive of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” said Ryan D. McCarthy, the secretary of the Army.
“Unfortunately, a ‘business as usual’ approach was taken by Fort Hood leadership causing female soldiers, particularly, in the combat brigades, to slip into survival mode,” the report said, where they were “vulnerable and preyed upon, but fearful to report and be ostracized and re-victimized.”
The Army secretary ordered that 14 officials, including several high-ranking leaders, be relieved of command or suspended and vowed sweeping reform that would extend far beyond Fort Hood to affect more than one million soldiers and Army civilians nationwide.
“This report, without a doubt, will cause the Army to change our culture,” McCarthy said.
The damning report comes as the military faces mounting public pressure to address years of allegations that harassment and sexual assault among soldiers had gone unaddressed.....
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"Sexual misconduct shakes FBI’s senior ranks" by Jim Mustain Associated Press, December 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — An assistant FBI director retired after he was accused of drunkenly groping a female subordinate in a stairwell. Another senior FBI official left after he was found to have sexually harassed eight employees, yet another high-ranking FBI agent retired after he was accused of blackmailing a young employee into sexual encounters.
What a nest of criminal scum over there!
An Associated Press investigation has identified at least six sexual misconduct allegations involving senior FBI officials over the past five years, including two new claims brought this week by women who say they were sexually assaulted by ranking agents.
Each of the accused FBI officials appears to have avoided discipline, the AP found, and several were quietly transferred or retired, keeping their full pensions and benefits even when probes substantiated the sexual misconduct claims against them.
Beyond that, federal law enforcement officials are afforded anonymity even after the disciplinary process runs its course, allowing them to land on their feet in the private sector or even remain in law enforcement.
“They’re sweeping it under the rug,” said a former FBI analyst who alleges in a new federal lawsuit that a supervisory special agent licked her face and groped her at a colleague’s farewell party in 2017. She ended up leaving the FBI and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“As the premier law enforcement organization that the FBI holds itself out to be, it’s very disheartening when they allow people they know are criminals to retire and pursue careers in law enforcement-related fields,” said the woman, who asked to be identified in this story only by her first name, Becky.
The AP’s count does not include the growing number of high-level FBI supervisors who have failed to report romantic relationships with subordinates in recent years — a pattern that has alarmed investigators with the Office of Inspector General and raised questions about bureau policy.
Did Strzok and Page?
The recurring sexual misconduct has drawn the attention of Congress and advocacy groups, which have called for whistle-blower protections for rank-and-file FBI employees and for an outside entity to review the bureau’s disciplinary cases.
“They need a #MeToo moment,” said Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who has been critical of the treatment of women in the male-dominated FBI.
“It’s repugnant, and it underscores the fact that the FBI and many of our institutions are still good ol’ boy networks,” Speier said. “It doesn’t surprise me that, in terms of sexual assault and sexual harassment, they are still in the Dark Ages.”
Do you know which district she is from?
In a statement, the FBI said it “maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual harassment” and that claims against supervisors have resulted in them being removed from their positions while cases are investigated and adjudicated.
It added that severe cases can result in criminal charges and that the FBI’s internal disciplinary process assesses, among other factors, “the credibility of the allegations, the severity of the conduct, and the rank and position of the individuals involved.”
The AP review of court records, Office of Inspector General reports, and interviews with federal law enforcement officials identified at least six allegations against senior officials, including an assistant director and special agents in charge of entire field offices, that ranged from unwanted touching and sexual advances to coercion.
None appears to have been disciplined, but another sexual misconduct allegation identified in the AP review of a rank-and-file agent resulted in him losing his security clearance.
Tough punishment.
The FBI, with more than 35,000 employees, keeps a notoriously tight lid on such allegations. The last time the Office of Inspector General did an extensive probe of sexual misconduct within the FBI, it tallied 343 “offenses” from fiscal years 2009 to 2012, including three instances of “videotaping undressed women without consent.”
The latest claims come months after a 17th woman joined a federal lawsuit alleging systemic sexual harassment at the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Va. That class-action case claims male FBI instructors made “sexually charged” comments about women needing to “take their birth control to control their moods,” inviting women trainees over to their homes, and openly disparaging them.
In one of the new lawsuits filed Wednesday, a former FBI employee identified only as “Jane Doe” alleged a special agent in charge in 2016 retired without discipline and opened a law firm even after he “imprisoned, tortured, harassed, blackmailed, stalked, and manipulated” her into having several “non-consensual sexual encounters,” including one in which he forced himself on her in a car.
“It is the policy and practice of the FBI and its OIG to allow senior executives accused of sexual assault to quietly retire with full benefits without prosecution,” the woman’s attorney, David J. Shaffer, alleges in the lawsuit.
One such case involved Roger C. Stanton, who before his abrupt retirement served as assistant director of the Insider Threat Office, a division at Washington headquarters tasked with rooting out leakers and safeguarding national security information.
Stanton retired in late 2018 after the investigation determined he sexually harassed the woman and sought an improper relationship. He did not respond to requests for comment from AP.
According to an Inspector General’s report concluded this year and obtained by AP through a public records request, Stanton was accused of drunkenly driving a female subordinate home following an after-work happy hour. The woman told investigators that once inside a stairwell of her apartment building, Stanton wrapped his arm around her waist and “moved his hand down onto her bottom” before she was able to get away and hustle up the stairs.
After Stanton left, he called the woman 15 times on her FBI phone and sent her what investigators described as “garbled text” complaining that he could not find his vehicle. The heavily redacted report does not say when the incident happened.
Stanton disputed the woman’s account and told investigators he “did not intend to do anything” and only placed his arm around her because of the “narrowness” of the stairs, but Stanton acknowledged he was “very embarrassed by this event” and “assistant directors should not be putting themselves in these situations.”
Poor fella.
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"A former French modeling agent who was a close associate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein has been charged with rape of minors over the age of 15 and sexual harassment, the Paris prosecutor said Saturday. The associate, Jean-Luc Brunel, 74, is also under investigation on suspicion of human trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation, according to the Paris prosecutor, Rémi Heitz. The indictment of Brunel, who has been placed in pretrial detention, is a significant development in a broader inquiry that Paris prosecutors opened in August 2019 to uncover potential offenses committed either in France or against French victims abroad in connection with the Epstein scandal. Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell last year at age 66. He was awaiting trial on charges of sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of girls and young women at his mansion in Manhattan, New York; his estate in Palm Beach, Florida; and other locations. More than a decade earlier, he had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor and was registered as a sex offender. Brunel was arrested at an airport near Paris on Wednesday. He was under no judicial restrictions at the time and was free to travel. Starting in the 1970s, Brunel carved out a successful career as a modeling agent in France. He then expanded his career to the United States, where he met and befriended Epstein, often traveling and socializing with him before the two had a falling out as the sex-trafficking accusations against the financier emerged. At least one of Epstein’s accusers has said that Brunel used his position as a modeling scout to procure minors for Epstein, who socialized with politicians, celebrities and Wall Street executives. Epstein owned an apartment in an upscale Parisian neighborhood and traveled regularly to France....."
French law criminalizes sex between an adult and a minor under the age of 15, and a sexual relationship between an adult and a minor over age 15 is legal unless accusations of sexual abuse can be supported by specific circumstances such as the use of coercion as Macron thrusts Muslims onto the front line of French politics:
"A heavily armed gunman in central France killed three police officers responding early Wednesday to reports of domestic abuse, in a rare outburst of deadly violence against French security forces that a local prosecutor described as a “war scene.” The gunman was later found dead. The officers had been called to a private residence in an isolated hamlet near St.-Just, a small village in the Puy-de-Dôme region of France, about 50 miles southeast of Clermont-Ferrand, to help a woman who had sought refuge on her roof after being beaten by her partner. “It’s an extremely complex crime scene, and at this time we are far from having all of the answers,” Éric Maillaud, the Clermont-Ferrand prosecutor, said in an emotional news conference. Maillaud identified the shooter as Frédérik Limol, a 48-year-old man with a “very worrying profile.” Limol was an avid survivalist and a fervent Catholic who, according to the prosecutor, seemed to believe that the end of the world was near....."
The deaths of the officers and the plight of the woman shocked France, where deadly violence against police is uncommon and where concern has been growing in recent years over the scourge of domestic violence as France allows care-home residents more visits.
Also see: French Filth
Fortunately, MIT is cleaning it up:
"MIT names a new director for its controversial Media Lab" By Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, December 22, 2020
MIT has named an astronautics professor who invented the BioSuit, a skintight space suit designed to increase the mobility of space explorers, to lead the university’s beleaguered Media Lab.
Dava Newman will be the first female director of the Media Lab, a research facility that was once a jewel of MIT’s campus but which fell into disarray last year after revelations that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had visited several times and was a valued donor.
Newman, 56, will take the helm in July. She replaces Joi Ito, who resigned last year amid news that he had aggressively wooed Epstein and accepted his money for both Media Lab research and his personal investments.
Newman has been an MIT faculty member since 1993, but left for two years in 2015 to serve as deputy administrator of NASA in the Obama administration.
“It’s a dream,” Newman said Tuesday about being chosen from a field of 13 candidates who were interviewed to lead the Media Lab. “What a magical place. It’s somewhere we can have science and engineering, art, design, and it’s really about emerging technologies.”
Newman said she plans to build on the Media Lab’s core strengths while enhancing its focus on health, climate change, and sustainability research, But she will also have to rebuild the Media Lab after a year of upheaval. Ito was among several staff who left or have been pushed out since fall 2019.
Since its founding in 1985, the Media Lab had been a freewheeling innovation center. Researchers were given the freedom to work on everything from sculpture and design to children’s learning technology, space exploration, and digital currency. Much of the lab’s funding came from corporate giants, including IBM, ExxonMobil, and Google, which gained broad access to the lab’s research. Fund-raising has always been a large part of the director’s role.
Ito famously did not have a college degree when he was hired in 2011 to lead the Media Lab, but he did launch an early Internet company in Japan and could tap into a global network of tech entrepreneurs and ensure that the lab’s work was broadly seen.
By hiring Newman, who has a long history at MIT, the university seems to have opted for a leader with a more traditional academic pedigree, but the hire also seems responsive to criticism the university received last year that it remains a difficult place for women to thrive.
“Dava emerged as an exceptional and exciting candidate whose interest in how science, design, and technology can intersect in truly novel ways aligns well with the core mission of the Lab, as does her infectious optimism, playful, can-do attitude, and fearless approach to big and challenging problems,” Pattie Maes, a media arts and sciences professor and chairwoman of the search committee, said in a statement Tuesday.
Newman said the Media Lab has been working to correct course, and she plans to meet with students, faculty, and staff to determine whether any additional steps need to be taken. The university, too, has been trying to improve its vetting of donors since the Epstein controversy, she said.
“We just want the sponsors to reflect who we are,” Newman said. “That’s who we’re going to work with going forward, people who love what we’re doing and hold our same values.”
Although much of her aerospace research has been funded by the federal government, Newman said she oversaw public-private partnerships at NASA and helped draft the agreement last year between MIT and Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, to bring the university’s experiments to the moon.
As a woman in the male-dominated astronautics field, gender parity has been a key concern for Newman throughout her career, she said. She said the Media Lab should be a leader in gender and racial parity — in both pay and representation — and she will aim to set robust goals toward that end.
“I like moonshots,” Newman said.
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Related:
"Calling a mechanical engineering professor’s decision to accept donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “poor judgment,” MIT on Friday announced that it will limit his pay and his involvement in undergraduate advising for five years. Seth Lloyd has been on paid leave since January, after a series of revelations about Epstein’s financial ties to MIT and the longtime professor rocked the campus and led to protests and resignations. Lloyd will have to take professional conduct training classes before resuming campus activities, including teaching, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt said in an e-mail to the community on Friday, but the discipline is unlikely to satisfy some at MIT who had called for Lloyd’s resignation and is likely to reopen one of the more embarrassing chapters in the university’s recent history....."
That's okay. The Globe quickly closed it again.
