NCFM Chicago Chapter President, Tim Goldich, Male Vulnerability to Accusation

Article here. Excerpt:

'An accusation need not be demonstrably false (false to fact), to be petty and unjust. Men’s vulnerability to false accusations is clear, but we must also consider men’s outsized vulnerability to dubious accusations.

Granted, the vast majority of women are far too sensible to damage a man over trifles. But then there’s the particular woman Jerold Mackenzie ran into.

On the morning of March 19, 1993, [Jerold] Mackenzie was talking to coworker Patricia Best, the distributor services manager, about a Seinfeld episode that aired the night before. Mackenzie asked her if she saw it; she did not. He told Best that Seinfeld’s date had a name that rhymed with a part of a woman’s anatomy and asked her to guess what rhymed with Delores. Best could not. Mackenzie apparently did not want to use the term “clitoris,” so he copied the page from the dictionary with the definition and showed it to Best.[i]

Best was offended. As a result, Jerold J. Mackenzie was fired from his $95,000-a-year job with Miller Brewing Co. for “poor managerial judgment” triggered by allegations that he had sexually harassed coworker Patricia Best. After two years and 71 attempts to find a new job, Mackenzie concluded that his colleague’s charges had rendered him unemployable.[ii] A jury awarded him $26 million, but then “The higher courts threw the entire award out.”[iii] Mackenzie went bankrupt—the cost to his reputation, his family, his life . . . devastating.'