HARASSMENT WATCH : Dinosaurs on Parade

Looks as if some guys still don’t get it. The alleged attempts of a Ventura lawyer and the Mariposa County welfare director to solicit sexual favors from prospective employees in the first case and from clients in the second, are, if true, sexual harassment, pure and simple.

The Ventura County district attorney has asked the State Bar to investigate lawyer Douglas Andrew Palaschak, who ran newspaper ads for secretarial help as a way of finding young women for sexual or romantic relationships. Palaschak, who currently faces felony drug charges, asked the women who answered his ads to sign a contract saying that they and he “mutually consent to all words, acts, sexual innuendo, sexual acts, touching, lewd behavior, etc.” Palaschak’s contract also specified “the non-work things” he wanted his secretaries to do: “Sex and romance would be nice.”

Apparently only one of the 50 secretaries Palaschak says he hired in the last year signed his contract. And she lasted just one day before she quit.

Then there’s the case of William L’Heureux, Mariposa County welfare director, who is charged with telephoning female welfare recipients for lewd and lascivious purposes. L’Heureux, who has since been suspended, faces two misdemeanor counts of using public records to obtain the women’s phone numbers and a third count of using a false name for lewd and lascivious purposes.

We were beginning to hope that allegations of such blatant sexual harassment were becoming relics. Evidently, not so.