Denise Shelton
2 min readMar 21, 2021

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Great take on it all, Sherry. I, like you have worked with a few sleaze bags. In the early 1980s, I was working the night shift in a cable TV master control room. The only people in the building were me, my senior co-worker Fred (not my boss) and down the hall two fresh out of college IT guys. As I’m going about my business stocking the pay-per-view movie tape decks, old Fred, seated at the master control console, asks me to come over and massage his leg. I gave him a withering stare and said something to the effect of, “Oh, please. Get over yourself, Fred.” He never bothered me again. I did tell my boss, who already had his suspicions about Fred. Not long after, Fred was fired, not for sexual harassment, but for stealing TVs. Now, I admit I was lucky that Fred wasn’t insistent or aggressive. In that case, nothing I said probably would have made a difference. But, as in some of the Cuomo incidents, he threw out a lure and I didn’t take the bait. I reported it, my boss told him to knock it off, and that was that. It didn’t cost me my job, I didn’t need to see a therapist, I had no desire to keep tabs on Fred and make sure he never held another job again. (I suspect he got a secure one in the state pen making license plates anyway.) Let’s hold people accountable, but first, let’s take responsibility and nip that shit in the bud. Predators choose their prey carefully. They go for the easy targets, the ones they think won’t put up a fuss. There’s almost always an initial “testing of the waters.” Be ready for it and make sure when the creep dips a toe in, it’s just too damn cold for him to want to take the plunge.

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Denise Shelton
Denise Shelton

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