A New York jury has found a TV news anchor was not harmed when her fellow reporters circulated a digitally enhanced picture of her with huge breasts — a verdict based in part on testimony that sexually charged pranks and banter were part of the milieu of the newsroom.

During a two-week trial in Brooklyn federal court, Adele Sammarco, a former reporter for Time Warner’s 24-hour news station New York 1, was discredited by former colleagues, including Jeff Simmons, the reporter who created the picture for a contest at an office picnic. He told the jury that Sammarco talked to him “openly and candidly about her breasts.”

“As a gay man, she and I had these conversations because she knew it wasn’t offensive to me,” Simmons said.

Sammarco claimed she felt humiliated by the photo but a Time Warner attorney said she laughed when she saw it and posed for a New York Post article holding it in her hand

The case is yet another where a plaintiff has failed to prove that a media workplace constitutes a hostile work environment. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the hostile environment standard requires "careful consideration of the social context in which particular behavior occurs and is experienced by its target."

In 2006, a New York jury said a co-founder of The Source did not sexually harass the hip-hop magazine's female editor-in-chief, apparently agreeing with the defense that salacious behavior is part and parcel of hip-hop culture. That same year, the California Supreme Court rejected claims that writers on “Friends” harassed an assistant when they bounced around sexually explicit ideas for the show.

Sammarco, 43, filed her lawsuit in 2002, alleging that NY1 ran its newsroom like “a high school boys' locker room.” During her nine-year career at the station, she testified, her news crew ridiculed her by calling her "BBB," for "Big Butt Booty."

She was fired in 2001 after complaining that fellow reporter Gary Anthony Ramsay groped and kissed her during a drive home. “He proceeded to ram his tongue down my throat so hard it felt like it was almost at my Adam’s apple,” Sammarco told the jury. Ramsay insisted he only gave her a “peck on the cheek.”

But testimony during the trial may have been more humiliating for Sammarco than any of the disputed incidents that occurred in the workplace. Two NY1 reporters slammed her abilities as a journalist, with Rebecca Spitz saying she had a “persecution complex.”

Defense attorneys portrayed Sammarco as a chronic complainer who presented the enhanced breasts photo as evidence of harassment only after she was notified that her performance was below par.

After just 40 minutes of deliberations, the jury rejected both Sammarco's sexual harassment claim and her claim that she was fired in retaliation for complaining about the alleged assault by Ramsay. Juror Marie Gorini singled out Simmons's testimony about the photo.

"I listened to him long and hard, because it just seemed like it was a joke between two really close friends,” she told the New York Post. “That's what you do with friends — you banter, you play a trick, you play a joke.”

Nevertheless, Sammarco, who admits that she may never work in television again, was upbeat after the verdict. She told the New York Daily News she was glad “the truth had emerged” and that she had made her parents proud by standing up to her former employer.

By Matt Reynolds
5/11/10