Have you been wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct? Are you thinking to yourself “This is such an overreaction! I only did it thrice and I even regretted it the last time. I’ve clearly learnt my lesson!”
This section is for you.
Of course you don’t really have to worry — what’s the worst that can happen? You get fired, spend a year complaining about how hard your life has been and then find yourself in a job that pays way more and has more lax rules.
You’ll be fine. But here is how you can ace your tone-deaf response to the accusation:
Start your response by talking about how you build the company, how you set up the sexual harassment policies and therefore you thought you didn’t have to follow it.
Address the jury individually and tell them that you always valued their presence. That you hope you didn’t let them down and you’re so sorry they have to go through this.
Use it.
This works in two ways: Firstly, you can make the harassment seem transactional: I provided them with mentorship and so they didn’t mind all the propositions.
Secondly, you get to say “if I cared about this person so much, I can’t have hurt them too”. After all, no mentor has ever assaulted their mentees right? Oh wait.
If an incident happened entirely in person and there is no way your victim has any documentation, deny it. There is no point in being honest right? You stand to gain nothing.
Now if you were stupid enough to assault them in front of a camera, you need to learn to fake remorse. This 7000th assault on a college kid who said no so many times, was obviously a mistake. You didn’t mean any harm because you are their noble mentor.
Pretend like the gift was an afterthought. Say it was just lying around in your bag and it meant nothing. Make it out as though your victim is overreacting.