Be Fierce by Gretchen Carlson

Author:Gretchen Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science / General, Social Science / Women’S Studies, Social Science / Sexual Abuse & Harassment, Social Science / Popular Culture
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

“WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT?”

Heather McDonald is a successful stand-up comic with a raucous wit and a tendency to speak her mind, sometimes in an edgy way. I mention this because when we spoke, she herself made the point: “I’m a female who’s an R-rated comic. How can I be sexually harassed? That’s like asking how can a prostitute be raped.” But these notions of who does and does not have the right to speak out is precisely what gives Heather’s story so much authority.

Heather’s experience began when she got a gig producing a podcast called Juicy Scoop for PodcastOne, which was owned by Courtside Entertainment Group. The chairman, Norm Pattiz, seventy-three, was a regular presence at the studio.

“You could tell the vibe at the place was hinky,” Heather told me. She says that Pattiz once brought a gun to a meeting and bragged about being an honorary LA sheriff. But she claims his sexual overtures made things really uncomfortable. She says he’d frequently make provocative comments, and would make her give him tight hugs when they met. At first she let these incidents go, thinking, “It’s just his old man ways.” She thought that he was annoying, but basically harmless. As often happens, the full impact of these behaviors kind of sneaked up on Heather. She didn’t get how miserable the atmosphere was until she left and realized how happy she was to be free.

The final straw came one day when Heather was in the studio taping a commercial for a bra made of memory foam. In the middle of the taping, Pattiz knocked on the studio door and called out a compliment about how popular her show was. Heather called back that she had to finish the ad, but he came in and hovered. Heather felt flustered and even a little scared. She stumbled over the words. “You’re making me nervous now,” she told Pattiz. “I have to do one more take.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Can I hold your breasts?”

“No!” Heather cried.

Pattiz held out his hands, telling her they were “memory foam” hands.

“I pushed him away, and I kind of laughed because I was so embarrassed for him,” she said. “But I was also intimidated.”

Later that day, Heather called Pattiz and told him she wasn’t going to do a podcast anymore. She said it was because she wasn’t making enough money. He didn’t take it well. PodcastOne was responsible for making her podcast available, and he made it very hard for her to get out of her contract.

Even as Pattiz was making life so hard for her, Heather was reluctant to tell people the real reason she’d left. “People said, ‘Don’t say anything. He could ruin you.’ So I kept it to myself.”

Pattiz finally gave her permission to do the podcast elsewhere, and that might have been the end of it. But Heather, observing that I and others had spoken out, decided that she too had an opportunity to stand up for herself and make a statement. And she had the goods—a tape of the episode in the studio, which belonged to her.

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