Did KBR rape Jamie Leigh Jones?

UPDATE: Greetings TBogg/Firedoglake readers. In fact, contrary to what you read there, I am a former employee of The Washington Times (resigned in January) and this post is not about "the bitch obviously had it coming," it's about whether KBR should be held corporately responsible for criminal actions it neither authorized nor condoned. -- RSM

She'll get her day in court:

A Houston woman who says she was gang raped by co-workers at a Halliburton/KBR camp in Baghdad won a major court battle late Friday when a Texas judge ordered that she can bring her case to court instead of forcing her into secretive arbitration proceedings with Halliburton and KBR. . . .
Jones says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

I don't think she's doing the lawsuit to get rich. Her lawyer, yes; herself, no. She'll get hers from the book deal and the movie rights. Excuse my extreme cyncism, but Jamie Leigh Jones' story has got "NYT bestseller/Oscar-winning movie" written all over it.

Gang rape is a crime, and the perpetrators should be punished, but Halliburton didn't rape Jamie Leigh Jones.

Halliburton hired Jones, and also apparently hired her rapists, but gang-rape was not any part of Halliburton's policy. They're in the engineering services business, not the rape business. They don't make a profit from rape, and yet somehow are being held financially liable for the criminal conduct of the persons unknown accused of raping Jones.

There was also an alleged cover-up:

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."
Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

If, as she alleges, security officers destroyed evidence of the rape, then by all means those security officers should be held accountable, just as the rapists should be held accountable, and whoever imprisoned her in a shipping container should also be held accountable. However, this kind of accountability -- punishing actual wrongdoers -- is not what the Jones lawsuit is about. What this lawsuit is about is a tort lawyer financially raping the stockholders of a major corporation.

The cost of this lawsuit will be borne by stockholders in Halliburton/KBR, stockholders who were not party to the crime, who would never condone such crimes, and who yet are being held accountable for these crimes. How so?

In her lawsuit, Jones' lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.
"I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws," said Kelly. "The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her."

In other words, it's like the "hostile environment" aspect of sexual harassment case law, the Catch-22 of equal rights. On the one hand, if KBR had refused to hire a woman for Iraq contractor employment, they'd have been guilty of illegal discrimination. On the other hand, they send a 20-year-old blonde into a male-dominated work environment in the middle of a war zone and she gets raped, and the corporation is held liable for the crime.

Did the board of directors approve a "boys will be boys" directive for KBR's Iraq barracks? Which vice-president of KBR signed off on the memeorandum that "created" that "atmosphere"? But the lawyers for Jones know that the jury that hears the case won't think logically. Instead, the jurors will decide that KBR is rich, and the plaintiff is poor, and something bad happened, therefore the company should shell out millions of dollars -- and the tort lawyer will buy himself a new houseboat.

In its own way, this is a legal abuse as bad as the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. I have all the sympathy in the world for a rape victim, but sympathy is not law.

The employees who go to Iraq to work for KBR are all adults. One wonders what policy KBR might have instituted to prevent male-female fraternization in its Iraq barracks without being accused of illegal discrimination.

Given that such fraternization was permitted, the law of large numbers would suggest that among the thousands of men working for KBR in Iraq, some few would be willing to participate in a gang-rape. (She says she was drugged; claims of being dosed with "date-rape drugs" mysteriously proliferate in the era of Jello shots. Note that Jones was below the legal U.S. drinking age at the time of this incident. Don't 20-year-olds ever get just plain-old drunk anymore? What did gang-rapists do before the discovery of Rohypnol?)

While the facts of the legal case remain to be examined, I have a hard time figuring exactly how the rape of Jones results in corporate culpability on the part of KBR. Americans routinely sue their employers for millions, then have the effrontery to complain about the lack of "good jobs."