CBS SETTLES SUIT ON SEX HARASSMENT

Elissa Dorfsman vs. CBS Inc. has been settled out of court. And so Dorfsman, 40, has resigned today from CBS-owned WCAU-FM in Philadelphia, where she has been employed for a dozen years, the last four as general sales manager.

“I’ve seen the ugliest and darkest side of this company, and I don’t want to see it anymore,” she said Thursday by phone from Philadelphia.

Last September, Dorfsman filed a $1-million suit against CBS Inc. and a veteran male sales executive on numerous charges, including sexual harassment--all stemming from a 1982 incident at a company sales dinner.

Details of the settlement were unavailable from either side because of a confidentiality clause in their agreement. A source close to the case, however, said Dorfsman will receive $250,000 from CBS.

Still pending is the portion of Dorfsman’s suit against Eli Kaufman, a top CBS Radio sales executive who left the network last fall. A separate settlement with Kaufman is expected shortly, said Dorfsman’s attorney, David Kairys.

“We are pleased with the (CBS) settlement,” a network spokeswoman said. “I don’t think that it represented a defeat or a victory for anybody.”

Others disagreed. “I think that it is very important,” said Kathy Bonk, director of the Media Project for the National Organization for Women Legal Defense & Education Fund. “It shows that women can take on the system and win.”

Sexual harassment and discrimination cases are continuing to increase nationwide.

The Dorfsman/CBS settlement comes on a day when jury selection is expected to begin in another highly publicized sex harassment case in Washington, a $1-million suit filed against ABC by Cecily Coleman, who was director of the network’s advisory committee on voter education before being fired in 1984.

In an even more celebrated case, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis is expected to rule soon on Metromedia’s appeal of a $325,000 judgment against it stemming from discrimination charges made by Christine Craft, a former news anchor at its station in Kansas City, Mo.

Dorfsman’s suit charged CBS with sexual harassment, sex discrimination, violation of both the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and her contract and with “gross negligence” in the “hiring, retention and supervision” of Kaufman. He is accused in the suit of being drunk and sexually assaulting and humiliating Dorfsman in front of 30 to 40 persons at a company sales dinner.

Neither CBS nor Kaufman denied the incident.

CBS had said it was following company policy in such cases by privately reprimanding Kaufman and requiring him to apologize to Dorfsman. However, Dorfsman contended that the network’s refusal to publicly chastise Kaufman gave the appearance that it condoned his actions.

Those actions, Dorfsman said when her suit was filed last year, began with Kaufman approaching the table were she was seated during dinner:

“The next thing I know is that he’s running his fingers all the way up my leg. . . . And then he took the fur tail from my shawl and made like he had pulled it out from my crotch.” Dorfsman said that Kaufman held the fur tail high above his head and whipped it around while shouting an obscenity about her. The suit described Kaufman’s behavior even more graphically.

“I would have been very happy to have all the disgusting things about this case aired in court, but I have better things to do with my life,” Dorfsman said Thursday.

The “disgusting things” did not end with the filing of her suit, said Dorfsman, who supervised a staff of 10 and earned as much as $80,000 a year as a highly successful sales executive at WCAU-FM.

She said that CBS has spent the last year investigating her and interviewing past and present colleagues in an attempt to discredit her.

“They asked them if I were a lesbian,” she said, “as if I would not have made a big deal of having been sexually assaulted if I liked men. And when that line of questioning didn’t generate much heat, then they asked whether I say suggestive things or come on to men. So, in their view, I’m either a lesbian or a slut.”

CBS refused to comment on her allegations.

Dorfsman also accused WCAU-FM general manager Vincent Benedict Jr. of baiting her with anti-Semitic remarks since the filing of her suit. Before the settlement with CBS, she said, she was preparing to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) concerning Vincent’s “discriminatory and retaliatory” suspension of her for a week in April.

She said that the suspension followed her strenuous objections to what she said were Vincent’s anti-Semitic remarks about a salesman she was planning to hire. Vincent also said that the salesman was unqualified because he was “short” and “from California,” Dorfsman claimed.

Benedict declined to be interviewed about Dorfsman.

Kairys, Dorfsman’s attorney, believes that the planned EEOC complaint was one of two factors that motivated CBS to settle the suit out of court. She will not file the complaint now, he said. “The other one is the Ted Turner matter,” he added.

The “Ted Turner matter” concerns CBS’ aggressive attempts to undermine Turner’s bid to acquire control of CBS and ownership of the network’s five TV and 13 radio stations.

Both CBS and Turner have asked minorities and such special interest groups as the National Organization for Women to make supportive comments to the Federal Communications Commission, which uses “character” as a barometer in assigning broadcast licenses. “Both CBS and Turner want to go before the commission with a clean slate,” NOW’s Bonk said.

CBS denies that the “Ted Turner matter” was a factor in the Dorfsman settlement.

Yet NOW made discussion of both CBS’ female employment practices and the Dorfsman case “a condition for opening a dialogue” with CBS in connection with the Turner takeover bid, Bonk said. “There was no quid pro quo, but it helped people (Dorfsman and CBS) get to the table.”

How significant is the settlement?

“I think it’s now clear that it is unacceptable for a woman to be humiliated when she hasn’t consented to be touched, whether or not a man is drunk,” Kairys said.

Dorfsman was accused of being unprofessional by speaking out. And she claimed that she was warned by a top CBS executive that she could not successfully sue the network and would destroy her career if she tried.

The case has been settled. But the status of Dorfsman’s career in broadcasting is still to be determined as she begins her search for a new job.

“This has been a living hell, and it’s changed me forever,” she said. “I felt like I was standing on the 15th floor of a burning building with the flames eating at my behind. I had a choice of standing there and being eaten by the flames or jumping out the window and maybe ending up dead or very injured or walking away alive. I had to jump. I just had to. I could not stay there and be eaten by the flames.”