There's No Equal Footing in Sex With the Boss

Well, here we go again.

This time it's in Ohio, where Attorney General Marc Dann insists that his extramarital affair with a subordinate was consensual.

That suggests an equal footing. It also suggests that Dann thinks the rest of us are as dimwitted as the buddies he fired last week.

Jessica Utovich is virtually half Dann's age, has a smidgeon of his higher education, earned about a third of his income and was employed at his mercy. If you can ignore all that, then maybe it's possible to think the boss and his scheduler really were equals in this equation.

Except that by the end of last week, Dann still had a job, while Utovich suddenly was unemployed. She resigned last Thursday, the day before he admitted in a news conference that their affair was a mistake and his behavior had contributed to a hostile work environment for other women in his office.

Utovich's colleagues told The Columbus Dispatch they saw her "crying in the office all day." Dann claimed he had no idea why she quit.

What an old story: Boss needs a boost for his aging ego, and there she is, only too willing to answer his unholy prayers.

Until.

Until his wife finds out.

Until he's fired.

Or in Dann's case, until the press starts asking inconvenient questions, such as, "Did your scheduler ever stay overnight at your apartment?" or "Why did you try to bring your scheduler, and not your wife, on a trip to Turkey?"

I'm not excusing Utovich's behavior. At 28, she's not a high schooler. But Utovich is hardly the first subordinate to mistake exploitation for romance. And Dann is certainly not the first boss to take full advantage of the misunderstanding.

The 2,200 or so e-mails between Utovich and Dann released by the attorney general illustrate the lack of parity:

"Please do not EVER tell me to stop acting emotional," Utovich wrote to Dann in September 2007. "I try to do my job to the best that I can and you s—- on it. I try my hardest to make sure you are taken care of, do what you need to and prioritize only to have you complain and change everything without telling nobody.

Your emotional crap is what makes everyone else miserable."

His terse response: "We are en route. I will call the reporter. Great work."

In another e-mail, she asked him, "Can you go to the bathroom or something and call me?" Two days later, she wrote, "My face hurts and burns from crying and I can't keep fighting."

There's another woman hurting in this scandal who does not deserve the pain it has brought to her life. Most stories refer to her as the wife who would not comment, but Alyssa Lenhoff is much more than that.

Dann's wife was an award-winning investigative reporter who gave up her newspaper career so that her husband could pursue his career in local politics. Lenhoff made many sacrifices during her husband's yearlong race in 2006 and bore most of the responsibility for their three children. She runs a journalism program at a state university, where I have watched students hang on her every word. Her absence at her husband's news conference proved she is also the rare political wife. A line had been crossed, and he would stand on the other side of it alone.

Marc Dann insists that, while others' careers crumble around him, his should remain intact. He wants us to believe that he's still the biggest, baddest law enforcer in the land and that this is what really matters.

In other words, the whole sex thing was overblown, and women are discardable.

I can't imagine parents encouraging their daughters to work for an attorney general who has created what one professor called an "Animal House" environment. The ranks of bright, idealistic young women in that office are bound to thin — and at a time when the need for them could not be greater.

And then there are all those women toiling away in less public, less scrutinized offices but subjected to similar hostile work environments. If the attorney general can get away with it, what is to happen to them?

My fear is that they'll suffer in silence.

Why would they think anyone would listen to them now?

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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