Sunny Hostin says she used to do whatever it took to cover her curves while working as a young lawyer.
While discussing Joy Behar’s newly published essay about workplace harassment on “The View” Friday, the 55-year-old revealed that she would bind her breasts during meetings in order to be taken more seriously.
“I recall so many interviews as a young lawyer where men never looked at my face. They just looked straight at my chest,” she said. “And I started binding my breasts so that I could get a job based on my qualifications.”
Hostin, who noted that she has since “had a breast reduction,” explained that she and her fellow female co-workers never felt comfortable reporting the harassment out of fear it would negatively impact their careers.
“When I was coming up at the Justice Department and when I was coming up in law firms … we had options [to report harassment], but I wouldn’t dare use them,” she said. “So as not to be blackballed out of a position because the structure, it was a patriarchy.”
Although some of the anchors insisted that things have changed for women nowadays, Alyssa Farah Griffin noted she dealt with similar treatment despite being much younger than the rest of the panel.
“I was talking to some of our younger producers and it mirrored some of the experiences we had in the workplace,” the former White House Director of Strategic Communications, 34, said of Behar’s essay.
“I had a direct boss when I was working on Capitol Hill — all the same things,” she continued. “We wore higher neck tops, we worse looser pants and … there’s not really an HR, surprisingly, in Congress.”
However, Griffin says she and the other women eventually “banded together” and got the unnamed man “fired.”
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“It’s like every single woman has experienced harassment,” she concluded. “The difference now — because of women like [Behar] and your generation — is there is places to report it and we have words to describe what it was that we experienced. We don’t just dismiss it.”
The conversation was spurred by the release of Behar’s witty, yet disturbing, essay, “#MeToo: The Early Years,” published on Air Mail this week.
In the letter, Behar detailed her experience with workplace harassment in the ’60s while working as an English teacher.
She recalled one particular moment in which her boss told her that her lesson on subject-verb agreement was “so arousing” that he felt the need “to throw some ice cubes down [his] pants.”
“[He] came up to me after my lesson ended and said, ‘You were so good, I could’ve f—ked you on the blackboard,’” she reflected.
“I was torn. On the one hand, I was revulsed. On the other hand, I was a self-supporting, single woman with no trust fund waiting for me, and the chairman of the English department liked my lesson,” Behar wrote. “My mind raced.”
Although she “thought of reporting” him, she “knew that would go nowhere” because the principal at the time was “only interested in catching students smoking dope in the bathrooms” — not on protecting his employees.
However, she said things only got worse, and the man continued to make unwanted advances on her until she invited him to a very pointed lesson on bullying.
When asked on “The View” Friday if she had elaborated on any of the details in the essay, Behar said that “the whole thing is true.”