Matt Lauer, had a bag of sex toys in his office. It’s one of the many complaints against him. But do you know who also liked to play practical jokes with sex toys and hasn’t been vilified or fired?
Bryan Cranston.
Shocked? No one has said one bad word about the star of Breaking Bad. Well, no one needs to because he said it himself. In an interview with AMC Cranston told a “funny story.”
We all have a lot of fun. You pull some practical jokes from time to time. For the episode where one of Jesse’s guys gets ripped off, I go to his house and I pull out a gun and put it on the counter and say, “I want you to handle it.” Well, props had a dildo, and I’m all serious and Aaron didn’t know so I’m looking at him and I pull out the dildo and say, “I want you to handle it.” He looks down and sees that and it’s all over. [Laughs]
Why isn’t Cranston’s head the next in line for removal?
To keep reading, click here: Bryan Cranston Played Jokes with Sex Toys on His Co-Workers, Why Wasn’t He Fired?
This seems like a false equivalency to me. How is Matt Lauer’s situation distinguishable from Bryan Cranston’s? Let me count [some of] the ways. Lauer gave a sex toy to a less-powerful, female, colleague, ALONG WITH A GRAPHIC NOTE AS TO HOW HE WANTED TO USE IT ON HER. Had Cranston exposed his penis to his co-worker — as reportedly, Lauer did — before saying, “I want you to handle it,” that would be a different case. Cranston’s actions took place on the set, in front of the entire crew, and were clearly intended as jokes. Sexual predators — what Lauer is accused of being — avoid witnesses, to the extreme of having buttons on their desks allowing them to lock the door against outside intrusions, pro-actively reducing potential complaints to “he said/she said” situations. Cranston’s actions were not calculated to exploit a power differential between himself and the victims of his pranks. In fact, the mooning incident made himself the “butt” of the joke, if you will. Neither of Cranston’s actions would be considered “severe,” for purposes of a sexual harassment analysis. And, unless he was constantly playing such practical jokes, to the extent that the workplace environment was permeated with them — creating a sexually-charged hostile work environment — his course of conduct could not be considered sexual harassment. The trickiest element of sexual harassment is that it be unwelcome. Telling a “dirty” joke — or playing a practical joke with possible sexual connotations — is always risky at work. However, in the context of show business — with its Bill Cosbys, Harvey Weinsteins, “casting couches,” etc. — Cranston’s wacky, relatively victimless, antics might have been “just what the doctor ordered,” providing well-needed comic relief.
Back when our sexual harassment training was done by one of the trial lawyers from the HR firm, his summary was “it’s only harassment if the other person is offended. But you won’t *know* whether or not they’re offended until *after* you’ve told the joke. So know your audience.”
(And Hollywood sets are full of practical jokers of all sorts. It really is pretty common, and commonly accepted when it’s intended to be harmless fun. It is, perhaps, one of the most extreme example of such tolerance. According to legend, Richard Dean Anderson had it written into his contract that he was allowed to do practical jokes on the set of Stargate: SG1. But, as present events show, even there, there’s a boundary that it is bad to cross. The trick is knowing where it is.)
I recently rebutted a comment on a post on another site that claimed a co-worker was terminated solely forbcommenting, “Nice sweater,” to a woman on the office.
I pointed out that the commenter wasn’t party to the discussion with the former employee. And people who are fired often don’t tell the truth about the reason; like most of us, they try to paint themselves in a sympathetic light.
We can thank the #Metoo movement for more awareness of this problem, but the ones who commit this behavior aren’t really concerned about who they have hurt as the only thing that concerns them is the money in their pocket after everything has been said and done.
Maybe this time , they are actually being effected financially in a negative sense but I am quite sure, they feel that they are the ones being harrassed by “lies” or fake reports. Matt Lauer”s lawyers are suing NBC for payment of rest of his contract dispite the fact that NBC has proper reason for the immediate layoff. (Unfortunately in NYS, the law requires 90 day notice for a layoff, I am not sure if there is an exception to this).
We are not even scrapping the bottom of the barrel of this problem, yet. Unfortunately, most of us have to deal with another sexual harassment class as prescribed by law, which does nothing to eliminate problem.
Wasn’t Matt Lauer FIRED for cause? I don’t know where a layoff comes into this. If he was fired for cause, a layoff never happened.