One of the women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment later complained that another supervisor circulated a semi-raunchy email.
Karen Kraushaar, who received a five-figure settlement in the Cain case, also alleged that her INS bosses treated her unfairly after she was hurt in a car crash by not letting her work from home, the Associate Press reported Wednesday.
This was around 2002 and Kraushaar had just gotten her first taste of the spotlight as the agency flak during the contentious custody battle for underage Cuban escapee Elian Gonzalez.
“The concern was that there may have been discrimination on the job and that I was being treated unfairly,” Kraushaar told AP, which broke the story.
Kraushaar had sought thousands of dollars in back pay, reinstatement of leave she took — and a one-year fellowship to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the AP reported, citing former supervisors.
The objectionable email, according to the wire service, listed the reasons why men and women were like computers.
They are like men because “in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on,” the joke went. They are like women because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”
Kraushaar, 55, said she did not remember asking for the fellowship and insisted her complaint was “relatively minor” and that she dropped the matter in 2003.
She later moved to the Inspector General’s Office in the U.S. Treasury Department, where she remains a spokeswoman.
Kraushaar was outed Tuesday as “Woman A,” one of two former National Restaurant Association employees who filed sex harassment claims against Cain, their then boss.
"She is a professional who had to leave her job because of Herman Cain,” a former colleague told The Daily News. “It is quite simple.”
Kraushaar’s lawyer, Joel Bennett, acknowledged that she was one of the two women who received a financial settlement of about $45,000 after accusing Cain in the 1990s.
Bennett was also Kraushaar’s lawyer in her INS dispute.
During a press conference Wednesday where he denied sexually harassing any of the four women who claimed to have been victimized, Cain said Kraushaar's allegations against him were not deemed credible.
Cain said his big offense was telling his accuser she was the same height as his wife.
“That was the one gesture that I remember," he said. “The door was open. My secretary was sitting there. It wasn't anything behind closed doors. I gestured because her height, comparing it to my wife's height, end of story.”
Bennett, however, told MSNBC his “client filed a detailed, written complaint in 1999 specifying multiple incidents of sexual harassment — my client stands by her complaint.”
The lawyer said Kraushaar’s allegations were similar to those of Sharon Bialek, who shook up the Cain campaign by publicly claiming the candidate shoved his hand up her skirt and tried to force her head towards his crotch.
Friends have described Kraushaar as a level-headed, married woman who would not fabricate explosive claims. And like Bialek, she is a Republican.
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