<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>The goal of this article is to provide a class of MeToo# victims of a high-profile serial sexual harasser with a non-invasive method for civil action, when the accused publicly dismisses the victims’ claims as lies. When these libelous claims do occur, the victims can be assembled into a class-action libel/defamation case, which in most US states must be mounted within two years of the claim. Because under current civil methods, the plaintiffs would be subject to intense cross-examination in a civil jury trial, class-action lawsuits with small numbers of plaintiffs (e.g. 5–8) have proven impossible to conduct. This article provides a blueprint to create a collaboration amongst the victims, credibility-assessment (lie-detector) experts, statisticians, and MeToo# attorneys to litigate libel suits, which will likely produce out-of-court settlements. Once the first case is successfully completed, precedent will be set to bring other perpetrators to justice, and act as a deterrent to future exploitation. The evidentiary basis would be based on testing the null hypothesis that all plaintiffs are lying, to compare the inferred lying rates of the plaintiffs to similar population controls, who would be known liars, to a “Yes” answer to “Did X sexually harass you?”</p></abstract>

The goal of this article is to provide a class of MeToo# victims of a high-profile serial sexual harasser with a non-invasive method for civil action, when the accused publicly dismisses the victims’ claims as lies. When these libelous claims do occur, the victims can be assembled into a class-action libel/defamation case, which in most US states must be mounted within two years of the claim. Because under current civil methods, the plaintiffs would be subject to intense cross-examination in a civil jury trial, class-action lawsuits with small numbers of plaintiffs (e.g. 5–8) have proven impossible to conduct. This article provides a blueprint to create a collaboration amongst the victims, credibility-assessment (lie-detector) experts, statisticians, and MeToo# attorneys to litigate libel suits, which will likely produce out-of-court settlements. Once the first case is successfully completed, precedent will be set to bring other perpetrators to justice, and act as a deterrent to future exploitation. The evidentiary basis would be based on testing the null hypothesis that all plaintiffs are lying, to compare the inferred lying rates of the plaintiffs to similar population controls, who would be known liars, to a “Yes” answer to “Did X sexually harass you?”

Trying an Accused Serial Sexual Harasser for Libel in a US Civil Court

European Polygraph

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

{"article-title":"Trying an Accused Serial Sexual Harasser for Libel in a US Civil Court"}

The goal of this article is to provide a class of MeToo# victims of a high-profile serial sexual harasser with a non-invasive method for civil action, when the...

Trying an Accused Serial Sexual Harasser for Libel in a US Civil Court

Published Online: Feb 21, 2021

Page range: 37 - 47

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ep-2020-0017

Keywords
Accuracy Detection, Barnard Test, MeToo#, Polygraph, Sexual Harassment

© 2020 Jonathan J. Shuster et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Trying an Accused Serial Sexual Harasser for Libel in a US Civil Court

Published Online: Feb 21, 2021

Page range: 37 - 47

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ep-2020-0017

KeywordsAccuracy Detection, Barnard Test, MeToo#, Polygraph, Sexual Harassment

© 2020 Jonathan J. Shuster et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Accuracy Detection, Barnard Test, MeToo#, Polygraph, Sexual Harassment