IOKIYAR: Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Edition

A while back, I featured a piece of high-grade snark on the topic of our state Senate Majority Leader stepping down. Amy Koch was one of the sponsors of the marriage discrimination amendment we’ll be voting on (and hopefully against) in November, and she resigned in an apparent attempt to keep her affair with staffer Michael Brodkorb.

Brodkorb, who had previously been deputy chair of the state Republican Party, also lost his senate staffer position in the aftermath of the affair. And now he’s considering getting litigious over it:

Former Senate Republican caucus spokesman Michael Brodkorb’s attorney, Phil Villaume, said the top administrative officer in the senate told Brodkorb that he was fired because he had an affair with former Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch. The complaint says that Brodkorb “has evidence that similarly situated female legislative employees, from both political parties, were not terminated from their employment positions despite intimate relationships with male legislators.”

“Our client was treated differently,” Vallume said at a Thursday press conference. He said Brodkorb is seeking at least $500,000 for being wrongfully fired. He said Brodkorb will file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and will then determine whether file a lawsuit.

I don’t know how well such a lawsuit would do. Brodkorb is well-known for being abrasive and a pain to work with. Despite what Brodkorb says he was told, it’s possible he was being kept around for patronage reasons that evaporated when Koch left the Senate. Or it’s possible that his position and duties were different enough from those of the female staffers he references that his being one of the family-values hypocrites made the firing warranted in his case only. I don’t know.

Still, if Brodkorb wants to try to prove gender discrimination, I completely support him in the effort. We’re not talking someone trying to use the law to fight affirmative action. This is actually the sort of thing the law was made for. Nor is it a frivolous law, despite what one of his co-bloggers insinuated less than a year ago. Let’s just hope that if he decides to go that route, he doesn’t turn around afterward and work for more candidates who are trying to undermine the law.

I do have to admit, though, this is one of those times I wish I could eat popcorn.

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IOKIYAR: Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Edition
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3 thoughts on “IOKIYAR: Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Edition

  1. 1

    Popcorn may be inedible (I can’t abide having it in my mouth) but it smells wonderful. Just make up a batch and treat it like potpourri.

    And there’s definitely a guilty pleasure in seeing people who have spent their lives badmouthing protective law suddenly discover it wasn’t so frivolous after all: the “abstinence only” advocate with a son who has an STD, the “pro life” activist with a pregnant daughter, the “tort reformer” who is badly harmed by medical malpractice, etc.

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