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"  During my basketball career at Northwestern University, I sometimes stopped to peer through the trophy case at the photo of Anucha Browne, a former Kodak All-American and U.S. National Team player. The first time I saw her on campus was during an alumni weekend in 1992, when she walked into the university&amp;#039;s Welsh-Ryan Arena with her husband, Roy Sanders Sr., and their son, Little Roy, who was a toddler at the time. Nearly a decade out of college, Anucha was still the picture of an athletic goddess: 6&amp;#039;1&amp;quot; tall and hard-muscled, with radiant dark skin. Wearing a sweatsuit and basketball high-tops, she smiled at her former coaches, who&amp;#039;d stopped in the middle of our practice, calling out, &amp;quot;A-NOO-ka.&amp;quot; When we split up into teams for a scrimmage, I noticed that the other players steered clear of her. Not me\u2014my place in Wildcat record books was just a few names below Anucha&amp;#039;s, and from that weekend forward, during alumni games and summer leagues, we always matched up. When the games started, without saying a word, Anucha&amp;#039;s teammates fed her the ball, and I did my best to stand in the way of a shooting machine, who, during her senior year in 1985, led the nation in scoring, averaging 31.5 points a game.  In January 2006, the news broke that my on-court rival had filed a sexual harassment suit against New York Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas, Madison Square Garden, and its billionaire owner, James Dolan. Soon after, I had dinner with a male friend and basketball player who within minutes of our sitting down said he doubted Anucha&amp;#039;s credibility. Before he could explain why, I told him that in my years playing against her\u2014someone who easily would have made the WNBA, had the women&amp;#039;s professional league been around when she graduated from college\u2014not once did I recall Anucha cheating, blaming, or belittling anyone. She was a power player, a leader, focused on the business of being the best. He nodded\u2014I knew he believed, like I did, that the way players act on-court maps how they act off it\u2014but he wasn&amp;#039;t moved.  &amp;quot;No offense to you or your girl,&amp;quot; my friend said, &amp;quot;but with all the women Thomas can get, why would he want to sleep with her?&amp;quot; In other words, as a solidly built, 44-year-old mother of three, Anucha just wasn&amp;#039;t cute enough to be sexually harassed by him.  Well, my friend was wrong, not least about what the courts define as sexual harassment. Last October, a jury of Anucha&amp;#039;s peers ruled in her favor and awarded her $11.6 million in punitive damages. She was set to go in front of a judge in December to learn how much, if anything, she&amp;#039;d be awarded in compensatory damages (for lost wages and legal fees), but before her court date, the Garden\u2014under pressure from NBA commissioner David Stern, who publicly derided the Knicks as &amp;quot;not a model of intelligent management&amp;quot;\u2014settled with her for $11.5 million and a guarantee not to appeal. (Through their publicists, Dolan and Thomas declined to be interviewed for this story.)  Still, as piggish as my friend may have sounded, he wasn&amp;#039;t the only one wondering what the hell had gone on at Madison Square Garden, that iconic institution of American sport. What exactly had Thomas\u2014no angel, albeit, one of the notorious Detroit Pistons Bad Boys of the late 1980s, but surely not stupid, either\u2014said or done to Anucha? Was she one of those hypersensitive, upright types who couldn&amp;#039;t tolerate a little sexual banter? Did Thomas proposition her, or something else? The question overarching all of these is what exactly counts as sexual harassment in this post-Anita Hill, post-Tailhook era? And how do the legal definitions\u2014and the way they&amp;#039;ve shaped the workplace\u2014impact all of us?  When I met Anucha a month after her court victory, for the most extensive interview she&amp;#039;s given about her case, she was bitter\u2014and incredulous about how she&amp;#039;d been treated by her once-beloved employer. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe they did this to me,&amp;quot; she said, over the thunderous sound of 600,000 gallons of water plunging 170 feet per second. We were at Niagara Falls, not far from her new home in Williamsville, New York. She&amp;#039;d moved there when, after 18 months and two binders&amp;#039; worth of rejection letters, she finally found work, as an associate athletic director at the University of Buffalo. The job pays less than half of her former salary, but as the primary breadwinner in her family (Roy is a social worker), she was grateful to have it.  I remembered how, seven years earlier, she&amp;#039;d beamed with pride in the locker room when she talked about the Knicks and becoming one of the highest-ranking women in the front office of an NBA team. Thanks to the court settlement, she was now wealthy, but the money hadn&amp;#039;t salved the wound. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never been so angry,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I worked my butt off for the Garden; I missed so many opportunities with my children.&amp;quot; (She has two sons and a daughter who range in age from 11 to 18.)  Anucha herself had a sheltered, though hardly luxurious, childhood, growing up in a slowly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Her mother, Alma, was a city planner, and Alfred, her Guyanese immigrant father, worked two full-time jobs to send the couple&amp;#039;s six children to private grammar and high schools. All of them went to college, to the likes of Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Smith, Yale, and Northwestern. &amp;quot;Our parents pushed and made us feel not only that we should never lack confidence, but that we were just so wonderful, we should always be striving for the next step,&amp;quot; said Anucha&amp;#039;s sister Ruth, who, like the rest of the family, attended much of the trial. &amp;quot;They treated us like we were setting the bar.&amp;quot;  Anucha&amp;#039;s entr\u00E9e into basketball came as a lucky break. Her pass out of the tightly monitored household came when she was assigned to walk the family dog, and she stumbled upon pickup games, teaching herself to play. She excelled on her high school team (while also figure skating), but this was pre-Title IX, when colleges rarely recruited female athletes. During a visit to her sister Vicki at Northwestern, Anucha introduced herself to the basketball coach and joined a scrimmage, whereupon she was offered a full scholarship. After graduating, she went to Florida State on a fellowship and earned a master&amp;#039;s degree in communications. Then she jumped on the corporate track.  Isiah Lord Thomas III, meanwhile, was the youngest of nine children raised largely by a single mother on Chicago&amp;#039;s poor, gang-infested West Side. Mary Thomas was strict and loving but overwhelmed caring for her brood. Food was periodically scarce, the heat shut off, and three of the older boys got tangled up with drugs and alcohol. Isiah made basketball his mission, however, after one of his brothers lectured that he was the family&amp;#039;s last hope: &amp;quot;Somebody&amp;#039;s got to get the NBA paycheck.&amp;quot; One of the nation&amp;#039;s top high school prospects, Thomas chose to play for the legendary Bobby Knight at Indiana University (where he failed to graduate, though he completed his bachelor&amp;#039;s degree, in criminal justice, as an adult). He went on to a storied career as an NBA point guard, and his immersion in the sport, to the exclusion of all else, is almost impossible to overstate. In a Sports Illustrated interview 20 years ago, Thomas earnestly asks his wife, during a discussion about religion, &amp;quot;Lynn, do you think they have basketball in heaven?&amp;quot;  In December 2003, when the Knicks hired Thomas as president of basketball Operations (he later took over coaching duties too), Anucha was eager to have him on board. Her primary responsibility as senior vice president of marketing and business operations was to handle community events and corporate sponsorships\u2014and Thomas seemed to have the basketball props and star power to &amp;quot;invigorate the fan base,&amp;quot; as she says. He&amp;#039;d recently been fired as the coach of the Indiana Pacers, after posting a three-year record of 131-115, but more important to Anucha, Thomas had been handpicked by her own mentor, MSG president Steve Mills. Mills had lured Anucha away from IBM in 2000, where she&amp;#039;d presided over the computer giant&amp;#039;s sports sponsorships. According to the story Anucha told in court and in discussions with me, her first clue that Thomas\u2014who maintained, in a statement to ELLE, that he&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;completely innocent&amp;quot;\u2014might be trouble came less than a month after he started. At Mills&amp;#039; suggestion, she gave him what she called a &amp;quot;cheat sheet,&amp;quot; a small, laminated card that held key information about season-ticket holders, community programs, and sponsors. &amp;quot;What the fuck is this?&amp;quot; he spat.  More disturbing, she says, she soon discovered that Thomas had a habit of calling her &amp;quot;bitch&amp;quot; as if it were her name. The weekend of an event at the Knicks practice facility for Poland Springs water, Anucha says he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bike room at the Garden, complaining that the players were tired. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not doing any more of these fucking community events,&amp;quot; he fumed, according to Anucha (who thought the team&amp;#039;s fatigue might have as much to do with point guard Stephon Marbury&amp;#039;s birthday blowout the night before). &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m here to win basketball games, and you&amp;#039;re not going to fuck up what I&amp;#039;m trying to do.&amp;quot; Incensed and unsure how to do her job in the face of such resistance, Anucha told Mills about the incident. &amp;quot;Isiah&amp;#039;s got a different way,&amp;quot; her boss said. (Mills refused to be interviewed for this story.) But what did that mean? At IBM, Anucha sometimes enlisted male coworkers to negotiate with international clients who balked at doing business with women, but Thomas&amp;#039; behavior was bewildering to her. &amp;quot;I was going out of my way to be a professional,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I kept thinking, Does this guy work differently?&amp;quot;  Shortly thereafter, Thomas&amp;#039; chief of staff, Frank Murphy, proved he could be as mercurial and menacing as his boss. Murphy was revisiting Thomas&amp;#039; complaint that the players were saddled with too many events when he exploded, standing over her at her desk. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like how I&amp;#039;ve been treated here for two years, and now you&amp;#039;re going to pay for it,&amp;quot; he shouted, before calling Anucha a &amp;quot;fucking bitch&amp;quot;\u2014all within earshot of her assistant, Faye Brown, who detailed the rant on the stand.  This was a turning point for Anucha. &amp;quot;It was clear Isiah had given [Murphy] carte blanche to say whatever he wanted to me. [Murphy] was like, There&amp;#039;s a new sheriff in town, and now you&amp;#039;re gonna pay.&amp;quot; As soon as he left, Anucha phoned Thomas. &amp;quot;What the fuck do you do?&amp;quot; he greeted her. After she explained her responsibilities, he\u2014in addition to calling her a &amp;quot;fucking ho&amp;quot;\u2014said, &amp;quot;Bitch, I&amp;#039;m the president.&amp;quot; Anucha again reported Thomas&amp;#039; verbal barrage to Mills, who convened a meeting between the two to delineate their roles. When it was over, Anucha reiterated to Mills that Thomas&amp;#039; demand that she steer clear of certain employees interfered with her job. He replied, &amp;quot;Just give him what he wants.&amp;quot;  Around this time, Anucha started jotting down notes about her clashes with Thomas in a portfolio where she keeps meeting notes and to-do lists. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve spent so much time on the basketball court, it wasn&amp;#039;t as if I was this overly sensitive woman,&amp;quot; Anucha told me. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m used to hearing people curse. It&amp;#039;s when they&amp;#039;re cursing at you and referring to you as a &amp;#039;bitch&amp;#039; and a &amp;#039;motherfucker&amp;#039; and a &amp;#039;ho&amp;#039;\u2014that&amp;#039;s when it&amp;#039;s beyond the lines. I hadn&amp;#039;t experienced this level of hostility in any job.&amp;quot;  At first, Anucha confided in her husband about what she was enduring, but she stopped after he told a basketball friend his low opinion of Thomas and it got back to Mills. &amp;quot;Roy is a good guy,&amp;quot; Anucha said, &amp;quot;but when this is happening to your wife....&amp;quot; She feared Roy might not be able to contain himself one day at the Garden if he kept hearing about how she was being treated.  &amp;quot;She tried to break it to me slowly so I wouldn&amp;#039;t be angry,&amp;quot; Roy says ruefully. &amp;quot;She did a good job of that.&amp;quot; To Anucha&amp;#039;s surprise, a year into Thomas&amp;#039; tenure, he became her No. 1 fan. After a game, he put his arm around her in a staff-only area by the Knicks locker room. &amp;quot;I figured out why we have problems; it&amp;#039;s because we&amp;#039;re so much alike\u2014I figured it out when we were playing H-O-R-S-E,&amp;quot; he said, referring to the shooting game that had been organized at a work Christmas party (one during which, Anucha&amp;#039;s assistant would eventually tell Anucha, Thomas stood behind Anucha, checking out her ass; &amp;quot;In my head, I was like, Oh, my goodness,&amp;quot; Brown said).  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m in love with you,&amp;quot; Thomas continued, comparing the love-hate relationship he had with her to the one depicted in the movie Love &amp;amp;amp; Basketball. When Jeff Nix, the Knicks assistant general manager and one of Anucha&amp;#039;s closest friends at work, walked in, she was awkwardly sliding out from under Thomas&amp;#039; arm. Go tell Mills, Nix advised later. Anucha did as he suggested, but Mills only shook his head. Then, Anucha says, Thomas asked her to go &amp;quot;off-site&amp;quot; with him for a meeting; she told him she&amp;#039;d consult Mills about it. &amp;quot;I felt extremely loyal to Steve,&amp;quot; Anucha says. &amp;quot;I felt he had a lot of confidence in me, and I wanted to do what was necessary to make things work.&amp;quot; Mills told her she could refuse Thomas&amp;#039; request. Still trying to find a way to reach Thomas, Anucha prevailed upon him to see that they had an obligation to Mills, who also was black, to keep things together. &amp;quot;You know what, Isiah?&amp;quot; she told him. &amp;quot;Where else would you see in all of sports an African-American president of the Garden, an African-American president of the team, an African-American senior VP?&amp;quot; Thomas agreed, but soon enough he was back to gushing, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re so beautiful,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so in love with you,&amp;quot; and entreating Anucha to go off-site for some &amp;quot;private time.&amp;quot;  The spring brought more head-banging frustration. After having earned straight 5s, or &amp;quot;outstandings,&amp;quot; in three years&amp;#039; worth of performance reviews, Mills gave her a 3 (&amp;quot;achieved expected performance&amp;quot;) in the categories of &amp;quot;develops relationships&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;demonstrates resilience and flexibility.&amp;quot; When Anucha protested she was doing the best she could in the abusive atmosphere, Mills raised both scores to 4 (though dropped her rating for &amp;quot;develops self&amp;quot; to a 3), signed off on a $76,000 bonus, upped her salary from $213,000 to $250,000\u2014and advised her to be sweeter and to adopt a &amp;quot;more nurturing&amp;quot; management style.  Next, at Mills&amp;#039; behest, Anucha had lunch with a human resources consultant hired by MSG, who mused about designing a program to address Thomas&amp;#039; issues with women. But nothing happened. Then, when Thomas&amp;#039; name came up in a casual conversation with Lynn Carfora, a woman in human resources, Anucha remarked, &amp;quot;You have no idea what&amp;#039;s going on here.&amp;quot; Putting her hands over her ears, Carfora trilled, according to Anucha, &amp;quot;La la la la, talk to Steve Mills.&amp;quot;  The beginning of the end came in the fall, when Anucha began fielding complaints of sexual improprieties by marketing rep Hassan Gonsalves, who was a cousin of Knicks star Marbury. &amp;quot;You look good in those pants. I bet that pussy looks good too,&amp;quot; Gonsalves told intern Kathleen Decker, who related this and other choice comments to Anucha. Though Decker later denied this, Anucha says the young woman also told her she felt pressured to have sex with Marbury when, after an evening at a strip club, the $20 million point guard asked her, &amp;quot;Are you going to get in the truck?&amp;quot; (Marbury&amp;#039;s response about the heat his cousin was getting? He called a marketing manager who worked for Anucha and called Anucha a &amp;quot;black bitch.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Fuck her,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;She don&amp;#039;t run the Knicks,&amp;quot; all of which the manager relayed to Anucha and documented. On the stand, however, Marbury went back and forth about whether he&amp;#039;d uttered the F-word, and said he&amp;#039;d onlycalled Anucha a &amp;quot;bitch,&amp;quot; not a black one.)  Gonsalves was eventually fired, but in view of what she and other women were having to endure, Anucha again went to Mills. The situation was &amp;quot;outrageous,&amp;quot; she told him tearfully. Something had to be done. He was apologetic, she said, but when Anucha got back to her desk, Mills was on the phone: Thomas was going &amp;quot;to start a rumor about [her] having an affair with Jeff Nix.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Is that a threat?&amp;quot; Anucha asked. No, Mills replied. Should she get a lawyer? No again.  Anucha called an attorney anyway, at her lawyer-sister Ruth&amp;#039;s urging, and then she and her legal representatives met with MSG lawyers. The parties agreed that she should take the week off between Christmas and New Year&amp;#039;s, for an investigation to be conducted. Near the end of that period, Anucha asked to return to work and was rebuffed. She was at home with her children when she got the call\u2014a month after she&amp;#039;d left the Garden. You&amp;#039;ve been fired, Kevin Mintzer, one of her lawyers, told her. &amp;quot;I remember needing to catch my breath,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I kept saying, &amp;#039;This can&amp;#039;t be right, it can&amp;#039;t be right.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Mintzer assured her it was true. &amp;quot;I will never forget that. I was crying, and I was in disbelief.&amp;quot;  On the stand, Thomas said Anucha had either outright concocted the run-ins she Described or misunderstood his intentions\u2014he never swore at her, he insisted. Mills echoed that, testifying that while Anucha complained to him about Thomas &amp;quot;a lot,&amp;quot; she never mentioned sexual overtures or profanity directed toward her. Overall, MSG&amp;#039;s lawyers contended that Anucha was fired because she couldn&amp;#039;t control her budget and bullied her employees, though there were no written evaluations or warning letters to substantiate such poor performance. Notwithstanding its decision not to appeal, the Garden continues to call the jury verdict a &amp;quot;travesty of justice,&amp;quot; and Thomas, through his publicist, suggests that \u00ADAnucha&amp;#039;s story was impossible: He&amp;#039;d spent maybe two or three hours with her since he joined the Knicks.  It was Dolan, while aboard the company helicopter, who gave the order to fire Anucha, later saying that she&amp;#039;d been dismissed for tampering with the internal inquiry of her complaint. One piece of \u00ADindisputable \u00ADevidence weakened Anucha&amp;#039;s credibility, and it had nothing to do with her on-the-job behavior: From 2001 to 2004, she made false statements to the IRS regarding various deductions, her explanation being that she&amp;#039;d failed to check her \u00ADaccountant&amp;#039;s work.  One of the most incendiary moments in the case came when it was revealed, in a deposition, that Thomas said that he wouldn&amp;#039;t stand for a white man calling a black woman a &amp;quot;bitch.&amp;quot; As for whether it bothered him for a black man to do the same? &amp;quot;Not as much,&amp;quot; Thomas answered. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry to say, I do make a distinction.&amp;quot; (During the actual trial, he amended that to say it was &amp;quot;very \u00ADoffensive for any man\u2014black, white, green, or purple\u2014to call a woman a &amp;#039;bitch.&amp;#039;?&amp;quot;)  Race played an important, though rarely overtly discussed role in Browne Sanders v. MSG\u2014as did class, which is not unusual in sexual harassment cases. African-American women file a disproportionate number of claims with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, though studies suggest that typically the plaintiffs are blue- or pink-collar \u00ADworkers. In this instance, race, class, and gender tensions intersected more subtly.  By her own and others&amp;#039; accounts, Anucha is like her parents: no-nonsense and strong-willed. &amp;quot;I would never say I wasn&amp;#039;t tough,&amp;quot; says Anucha, describing her demeanor at work. &amp;quot;We had high standards for people; my management had high standards for me. It was a tough business environment, but it wasn&amp;#039;t mean.&amp;quot;  Anucha certainly felt free to briskly chide me when she thought I was asking a silly question, and her assistant Brown and fellow executive Nix, while calling her an &amp;quot;outstanding leader,&amp;quot; allowed that her directness rubbed some the wrong way. &amp;quot;She carries herself with confidence, and [colleagues] sometimes misinterpreted that as her being stuck-up,&amp;quot; Brown said. &amp;quot;Basically, if she asked them for a document, and they came to her with half a document and she asked for the whole thing, they took that personally.&amp;quot;  The substance of the conflict between Anucha and Thomas was that she expected him to participate in the marketing program, and he\u2014who, it must be said, was under incredible pressure to improve the (still) frightfully bad Knicks\u2014wasn&amp;#039;t interested. The match seemed to have been lit when Anucha kept pushing Thomas, when she wasn&amp;#039;t blown back by his profanity-laden tirades. &amp;quot;He can&amp;#039;t in his mind get along with Anucha, \u00ADbecause here&amp;#039;s someone who&amp;#039;s not only an equal but in some respects needs to dictate what he does,&amp;quot; says George Washington University law professor Tanya Hernandez, who closely followed the case. Hernandez also wonders if Anucha, with her proper speech and bearing, at some level embodied for Thomas a &amp;quot;white corporate presence&amp;quot; that rankled or intimidated him. Once, Anucha testified, when she reminded Thomas that the league required the team to hold certain events for season-ticket holders, he replied, &amp;quot;Bitch, I don&amp;#039;t give a fuck about the season subscribers. I don&amp;#039;t give a fuck about these white people.&amp;quot;  To prove that Thomas comported himself \u00ADadmirably with women, the Knicks put team doctor Lisa Callahan on the stand to state that she&amp;#039;d never had any conflicts with him. But Callahan was Thomas&amp;#039; clear subordinate (he hired her), and he was likely to deem an \u00ADAfrican-\u00ADAmerican woman tall enough to look him in the eye as far more &amp;quot;emasculating&amp;quot; than a \u00ADpetite white physician, Hernandez believes. &amp;quot;He seemed to buy into the myth that successful black women take something away from black men,&amp;quot; she says, especially those black women who supposedly &amp;quot;act white.&amp;quot;  As far as Anucha knows, she was the \u00ADhighest-ranking African-American woman Thomas had ever worked with (her closest equivalent was a black female vice president whose tenure at the Pacers coincided with Thomas&amp;#039;). Moreover, Anucha said, &amp;quot;Many of the women he&amp;#039;s interacted with in his basketball career were there for a very different reason.&amp;quot; To put it less delicately, professional sports is a world of high-testosterone men, and basketball, in particular, is known for the groupies who trail players from city to city. Part of NBA training for rookies has been to teach them to inspect condoms proffered by bedmates, lest a woman has pricked a rubber in hopes of scoring a baby. (Which is reminiscent of something else Anucha said when she was telling me and her fellow alumnae about her new job with the Knicks: Right off, she&amp;#039;d noticed how inappropriately some of the female office workers were dressed. Work isn&amp;#039;t a &amp;quot;bootie call,&amp;quot; she said, grinning, adding that she intended to correct the matter.)  Nix summed up the situation between \u00ADAnucha and Thomas this way: &amp;quot;Because he&amp;#039;s an NBA All-Star and champion, probably every woman he&amp;#039;s ever come across has bowed down to him. He ran into someone who couldn&amp;#039;t care less about who he was.&amp;quot; Seven months \u00ADafter confirming Anucha&amp;#039;s version of events in a \u00ADdeposition, Nix&amp;#039;s contract was not renewed by the Knicks. He&amp;#039;d been with them for 15 years.  Perhaps the two most entrenched popular assumptions about sexual harassment are that cases are always based on a male boss&amp;#039;s \u00ADcampaign to get a female employee into bed, and that the law, as it has developed in the past two \u00ADdecades, has sucked the life out of the office: These days, men are afraid to joke around with women, act too friendly, or even compliment a female \u00ADcoworker on her nice new dress.  As for the first, Anucha says she has no idea whether Thomas actually wanted to sleep with her: &amp;quot;All I know is that I was thinking how uncomfortable this man made me.&amp;quot; It could be, Hernandez says, that when, at the Christmas party, Thomas got a glimpse of Anucha outside of marketing meetings, he was impressed\u00AD\u2014as in, &amp;quot;Man, that girl can shoot.&amp;quot; (The male/\u00ADfemale protagonists in Love &amp;amp;amp; Basketball, by the way, are both top-notch college prospects who, among other things, play strip one-on-one with a Nerf hoop.) Or it could be that Anucha&amp;#039;s prowess in his sport gave Thomas another reason to want to put her in her place. &amp;quot;You find this in field after field,&amp;quot; says Yale law professor Vicki Schultz. &amp;quot;When women try to compete in professions dominated by men, some men can&amp;#039;t stand it\u00AD\u2014to them, their jobs represent their manliness, and they&amp;#039;re threatened when women can do those same jobs and do them well.&amp;quot;  In other words, sometimes men chat up women because they want to get physical with them; sometimes they just want to humiliate or manipulate them. Whether Thomas was besotted with Anucha, unnerved by her, or both, my friend&amp;#039;s comment during dinner revealed a kind of blinkered sexism: Even \u00ADstudly athletes hit on women who &amp;quot;don&amp;#039;t look like \u00ADBeyonc\u00E9,&amp;quot; as Anucha says.  Schultz, having reviewed hundreds of sexual harassment cases, says that Thomas may have given Anucha a legal gift when he used female-specific sexual invective (&amp;quot;bitch&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ho,&amp;quot; \u00ADrather than &amp;quot;asshole,&amp;quot; for instance) and, in \u00ADparticular, started coming on to her. \u00ADTraditionally, the courts have tended to rule more in favor of women who have been the \u00ADsubject of explicitly sexual treatment rather than discriminatory conduct that doesn&amp;#039;t seem motivated by lust (to give a few examples, putting rats in the lunch box of a newly hired female \u00ADcoworker, refusing to show her the ropes, or shoving a file cabinet at her as a &amp;quot;joke&amp;quot;). Schultz has criticized this legal reasoning, arguing that it misses the equally discriminatory &amp;quot;microlevel interactions designed to undermine a woman&amp;#039;s competence,&amp;quot; such as &amp;quot;denigration, exclusion, isolation, [and] work sabotage.&amp;quot;  Which brings us back to the notion that many workplaces have become almost ridiculously desexualized. Feminist law professor that she is, Schultz believes that this &amp;quot;sanitization&amp;quot; has occurred, for several reasons. For one, \u00ADliability-phobic companies have overreacted to the courts&amp;#039; tendency to consider sexual conduct as &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; sexual harassment. For another, rigid regulation of sexual behavior jibes neatly with age-old management philosophies about how to get the most out of workers. &amp;quot;[It was] \u00ADtwentieth-century organization men,&amp;quot; Schultz writes, &amp;quot;who took the lead in creating the asexual imperative: men like Frederick Winslow Taylor, who saw managers as rational &amp;#039;heads&amp;#039; who would control the unruly &amp;#039;hands&amp;#039; and irrational &amp;#039;hearts&amp;#039; of those...in the modern organization.&amp;quot;  Though corporate harassment policies are still fixated on proper touch and talk, Schultz says, courts have begun to more deeply probe the gender-discriminatory context, or lack thereof, in which sexual behavior occurs: How many female workers are there overall? Do women hold powerful positions? Are training and promotions doled out equally? The more women working somewhere, the more &amp;quot;power they have to shape the uses to which sexual conduct is put and to set limits on acceptable behavior,&amp;quot; Schultz observes, which is why sexual jokes can mean an entirely different thing (and may not merit a legal claim) to the mostly female staff of a women&amp;#039;s magazine, say, or among a group of male and female waiters who &amp;quot;shamelessly proposition and pinch each other&amp;quot; than to, well, women executives in professional sports.  According to the Knicks&amp;#039; 2005-2006 yearbook, a quarter of the organization&amp;#039;s approximately 259 employees were female when Anucha worked there, though only three of the 21 \u00ADupper-\u00ADmanagement slots were filled by women. And since her victory, other women have come forward to paint the Garden as little more than a glorified frat house. At the end of December, MSG settled with New York Rangers cheerleader Courtney Prince for an undisclosed amount; she&amp;#039;d filed a sexual harassment suit in October 2004 saying she&amp;#039;d been kicked off the team \u00ADafter she warned her fellow City Skaters that a certain MSG \u00ADemployee was a sexual predator. In her complaint, the former captain of the Skaters also said that Rangers staff grilled her about the women&amp;#039;s sex habits and asked that she join a threesome. Less than a week after the Prince settlement, two African-American security supervisors, both women in their fifties, sued the Garden for discrimination, claiming that they&amp;#039;d been moved from their courtside positions into the less desirable nosebleed seats so that young white women who were &amp;quot;personally involved&amp;quot; with MSG staffers could take the better posts.  Interestingly, a handful of attitude surveys suggest that while black women file a disproportionate number of claims with the EEOC, the range of behaviors they classify as sexual harassment is smaller than their white counterparts. In Hernandez&amp;#039;s small study, for example, women of color were more likely to shrug off sexual harassment, to consider it unavoidable, just men being men. &amp;quot;[Black and Hispanic] women have this sense of the workplace environment as being hostile generally,&amp;quot; the professor concluded\u2014sexual harassment was just one more indignity to suffer quietly.  One possible reason black women file a disproportionate number of claims with the EEOC is that they&amp;#039;re \u00ADharassed more often, or more \u00ADaggressively, than white women. Another may be that they&amp;#039;re more likely to be brushed off when they complain in-house, usually to white women, who dominate the field of human resources. &amp;quot;Black women go to HR, and a claim rarely comes out,&amp;quot; Hernandez says, &amp;quot;which means something mysterious happens during the administrative claims process.&amp;quot; Their only choice, then, is to seek redress through the government agency or the courts.  Life has settled down for Anucha since I met with her at Niagara Falls. &amp;quot;The old Anucha is back,&amp;quot; Roy tells me cheerfully when we speak on the phone, and she does seem looser, far less grim than she had. We&amp;#039;d paused as we were crossing a bridge over the falls, staring down to watch the rapids rush toward their massive descent. &amp;quot;Can you imagine if you were floating out there, knowing you were going to go down?&amp;quot; Anucha said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d be screaming, &amp;#039;Help! Help me!&amp;#039;?&amp;quot;  It was hard not to see this comment as a metaphor for how desperate Anucha felt as her job got rougher and rougher, without a lifeline in sight. But then, she is hardly the dramatic type. When she thinks about the tumult at the Garden, what still amazes her is how easily the whole thing could have been avoided. &amp;quot;All they had to do,&amp;quot; Anucha says, &amp;quot;was tell him to behave.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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