CRAFT TAKES BAD NEWS IN STRIDE

Aug. 8, 1983.

“I feel fantastic,” smiling, euphoric news anchorwoman Christine Craft told a swarm of media outside the Kansas City courthouse where a federal jury had awarded her $500,000 in her fraud and sex-bias case against Metromedia Inc.

Late that evening, mentally and physically spent from the two-week trial, she was more reflective. “It’s just the whole grief of realizing that it’s not over,” Craft said with a sigh. “They (Metromedia) are big and huge and they can rip it out of your hands.”

As Craft’s attorney Dennis Egan had warned: “It ain’t over until it’s over.”

On Monday--four years after Craft had filed her celebrated suit and after she had repeated her story endless times on national TV and in speeches across the nation --it was finally over. As it turned out, she had been prophetic that evening in Kansas City. There would be no ticker-tape parade, no champagne celebration.

“Those -------s,” Craft said on the telephone Monday from Sacramento where she co-anchors the 10 p.m. news on KRBK-TV.

The U.S. Supreme Court, with only Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dissenting, had refused to hear Craft’s case, in effect, letting stand a federal appeals court ruling that erased her legal victory.

Craft had sued Metromedia charging that KMBC-TV (a Kansas City station that Metromedia then owned), among other things, had removed her from her anchor job in 1982, claiming that she was “too old, too unattractive and not deferential enough to men.”

She was a hardly tottering 37 at the time, and, was very attractive, although no Barbie doll. There was no escaping the odious reality, though, that she was not deferential to men. For shame!

Objectivity goes out the window here, because Craft is just one of the neatest people I’ve met in 15 years of covering TV. I’ve seen her when she’s high and, on occasion, when she’s low. She’s no demure sweet pea. On the surface, at least, she’s a real powerhouse, extremely bright, funny and articulate. She has never shrunk from hyperbole. Practically every sentence from her lips is the kind of biting quote that reporters would kill for, and she knows it. But she’s honest.

I think that Craft was wronged by Metromedia because of her sex. I believed it when I first heard her story while she still was anchoring the news at KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara. I believed it when I covered her first trial in Kansas City. I believe it now.

Far more important, that first jury believed Craft, too.

But a lot of murky legal water had trickled under the bridge since Craft’s first win. Presiding Judge Joseph E. Stevens threw out the fraud verdict, rejected the jury’s recommendation that Metromedia be found guilty of sex bias and ordered a new trial on only the fraud claim.

In 1984, the second jury also ruled for Craft and awarded her $325,000 in damages. But a federal appeals court overturned that verdict in June, and this is the ruling that the Supreme Court let stand after being petitioned by Craft to hear the case.

Our legal system sometimes works in baffling ways. After hearing the evidence, two separate juries of Craft’s peers sided with her against Metromedia. Yet legally, she wound up a loser.

“It’s still a moral victory,” Craft said, sounding slightly less combative than usual, “because there are now hundreds of women who have let me know how important this issue is to them. And perhaps news directors will be more careful now.”

It’s somehow appropriate that Craft now likens herself to Curt Flood, the former major leaguer whose losing legal fight against baseball’s reserve clause in 1969 paved the way for free agency and today’s soaring salaries. Craft had testified that her on-the-air knowledge of sports had irked her male colleagues at KMBC-TV in Kansas City.

Craft said she now understood “what Metromedia meant when they said I couldn’t fight a $1.5- billion corporation. But there’s no way Metromedia can claim total victory. There’s no way they can take away those verdicts.”

“She won twice,” Craft’s attorney, Egan, said from his Kansas City law office. “There is a flaw in the system when an appeals court can interfere like this.”

Craft and Egan knew their chances of arguing her case before the Supreme Court were slim because the justices hear only a tiny percentage of the cases they are asked to hear. Yet it wouldn’t be like Craft, a staunch women’s rights activist, to ignore the dissension of O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s only female justice. “That tells me,” she said, “that we need more women in the judicial system, government and TV news.”

She noted the recent political upheaval that brought a woman to power in the Philippines. “I look at Corazon Aquino and I see other countries surpassing this one (the United States) in equal opportunity for women,” she said.

Craft, who supported herself mainly on the lecture circuit until recently signing a two-year contract with KRBK, received widespread support from the National Organization for Women and other women’s groups. Egan said she has no outstanding attorneys fees.

One matter yet to be resolved, though, are Metromedia’s $17,000 out-of-pocket costs that Egan said Metromedia has asked the court to make Craft pay.

“I don’t have any money,” Craft said. But she has plans, including her book about her case, expected to be published by Capra Press in the fall.

And she has friends. On Monday, ironically the day the Supreme Court refused to hear her case, a resolution was read in the California Senate saluting Craft for her achievements. It had been written by Sen. Henry Mello (D-Monterey) before the high court’s decision.

It’s a fair bet that Craft would prefer being a monied legal victor instead of a penniless martyr to the cause of women’s rights. But no one is better suited to make the case. Or feistier.

On Monday morning, callers to Craft’s home heard the following message on her answering machine: “Yes, I do have a comment on today’s decision. I will be in front of the California state Capitol at 11 a.m. prior to going to the Senate.”

So Craft held her press conference. “I can hide from the world or go out and face it full bore,” she said that afternoon. “I’m glad I did the latter.”

Bravo, Christine.