A couple of weeks ago I did a brief post, and guestblogger Victoria Pynchon did a longer one, on the unusual sequence of events by which American Apparel and its founder Dov Charney settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for an agreement to pay $1.3 million tied to an (abortive) agreement to send the case to what a judge characterized as a sham arbitration designed to end favorably to the company. The company hadn’t at that point (so far as I know) responded publicly to the controversy, but shortly thereafter got its side of the dispute more or less on the record as part of a lengthy post at the blog Jezebel (Oct. 31). There’s also a related Oct. 30 item on the case at Portfolio. It quotes ubiquitous NYU legal ethicist Stephen Gillers, with whose views this blog is frequently out of step, who “said he found no real ethical problems with the ginning up of a sham arbitration to issue a press release. ‘The lawyers had no duty to insure that the public got the facts or that the issues were resolved based on a real trial before a real tribunal with real evidence.'”
