Matt Damon, among other men, is concerned that we are treating all acts of sexual misconduct the same. “I do believe there’s a spectrum of behavior,” he explained to Rolling Stone, in an interview that drew considerable attention. For him, that spectrum extends from “rape and child molestation,” which merits prison, to “other stuff” that’s merely “shameful and gross.”

He’s quite sure that Louis C.K.’s behavior, which includes masturbating in front of female colleagues, falls on the “shameful and gross” end of the spectrum. Damon asks us to consider that maybe Louis C.K. has suffered enough already.

And as for Al Franken? Well, “putting his hands on that woman’s flak jacket and mugging for the camera, going like that, you know, that is just like a terrible joke.” Although Damon says these actions were wrong, he also pleads that they “don’t belong in the same category” as Weinstein’s.

Damon is right that sexual misconduct falls on a continuum, and right that we need to differentiate among different allegations. But there are some pretty important demarcations on the spectrum between “prison” and “gross” — or “prison” and “bad joke.”

And it’s safe to say that “groping,” under the law, is considered much more than a joke.

Some of the confusion we’re hearing in discussion of the recent predatory offenses is understandable, because the law is complicated: Sexual misconduct is regulated by both civil and criminal laws, and the two don’t always match up exactly. And in every case, much depends on the specific circumstances, and on the identities of the perpetrator and victim.

That’s true of groping, as of other sexual offenses. Merriam-Webster defines the verb “to grope” as “to feel about blindly or uncertainly in search.” But as an intransitive verb, “grope” means to “feel up,” as in what boss might do to his female subordinate. Culturally, the word “grope” connotes unwelcome sexual touching.

Should groping a woman land you in prison or just make you feel ashamed? Probably something in between.

The line between sexual assault and battery

No state classifies “groping” as either rape or sexual assault, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a crime. Most state criminal codes also prohibit both sexual and nonsexual “battery” — an offense that involves unwanted touching of a person’s body and that reflects our deeply held sense that people have a right to be left alone. This conduct is usually a misdemeanor, especially for a first offense.

Now, obviously, not all unwanted bodily touching is a criminal act (or we would have been forced to shut down most public transportation a long time ago). Battery is typically defined to include intentional touching that is “harmful or offensive.” Cutting or punching someone qualifies as harmful; spitting in someone’s face would count as offensive. And while the perpetrator must intend the touching, he need not intend that it cause harm or offense in order to commit a crime. It simply must qualify for that description in the eyes of a “reasonable person.”

States also typically have a separate offense called “sexual battery” reserved for intentional touching of a person’s private parts, especially if done for the purpose of the perpetrator’s sexual gratification, or to abuse or degrade the victim.

But what if some hilarious person — say, a US senator — grabs a woman’s breasts? (There’s some dispute about whether Sen. Franken actually grabbed the breasts of the radio host Leeann Tweeden or just made it look like that for the now-infamous photo.) Is that battery? States diverge on whether breasts are covered under sexual-battery law; in some states, sexual battery only occurs when the perpetrator touches the anus or genitals or another person. But many other state laws sweep more broadly and specifically include touching of the breasts and buttocks.

Even where the sexual battery law does not apply, the regular battery law might because an ordinary person would almost certainly find the breast-grab offensive. (Again, if the groper is following the president’s grab-’em-by-the-pussy playbook, there is no question that the sexual battery laws apply.)

Criminal law, however, is just one of the ways in which groping can be deemed wrongful. Battery, for one thing, is also a tort, a civil cause of action that allows a person to sue another person for money damages. So the victim of a breast (or other body-part) groping might be able to get some measure of justice that way. Think Taylor Swift, who successfully obtained a battery verdict against a radio host who reached up her skirt and grabbed her ass during a photo shoot. She was awarded the $1 she sought, which she said was a symbol for victims who could not speak out.

Groping and workplace sexual harassment

But crucially, given the national conversation about sexual harassment by powerful bosses, groping in almost all cases will meet the definition of unlawful sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment in the workplace is a form of intentional discrimination that can trigger action under state or federal anti-discrimination laws. Groping falls on a long list of behaviors that can create a hostile working environment.

Actions that create such an environment must be unwelcome, severe, or pervasive, and committed because of the victim’s sex. And they must create an environment that a reasonable person would find hostile, offensive, or abusive.

Groping outside of a consensual sexual interaction is almost always unwelcome, so we can check that box. The “because of sex” requirement will often be met either because heterosexual men grope people to whom they are attracted (who happen to be women). And appellate courts routinely classify physical harassment as severe, which means that it shouldn’t have to happen regularly in order to be actionable in court. In contrast, a boss might be able to get away with a stray sexist comment or two.

That said, many plaintiffs will find that courts dismiss their cases even though what they have alleged seems to meet the legal definition of a hostile environment. But while you might not win the case, it would not be because the discrimination law relegates groping to a semi-benign category of being merely “shameful and gross.” A court might just not be convinced that the groping was sufficient to transform the environment into a hostile one—at least not without repetition or other forms of misconduct alongside it. (I believe — as do law professors Sandra Sperino and Suja Thomas, who recently discussed this issue in the New York Times — that this represents a misreading of the law.)

Employers have a responsibility to act against groping. Gropers may be prosecuted for battery (although there is no guarantee), but they can’t be held individually liable for workplace discrimination. Only employers can. They thus have an incentive — dramatically heightened by the current feeling of collective outrage about the widespread ignoring of, and implicit condoning of sexual misconduct — to penalize the harassers. Working within the legal standard, employers have almost unfettered discretion to decide whether and what punishment might be appropriate.

What seems like appropriate punishment to some may seem like vast over- or under-punishment to others. The controversy over the treatment of New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush — suspended but not fired for allegations of groping and related misconduct — provides a current example of such differences of opinion.

Standard HR dogma counsels a system of escalating and proportional punishments for violation of employment policies. But in this particular cultural moment, employers face pressures much more powerful than the fear of civil liability. Whether these actions represent a much-needed correction of a regime that has systematically under-enforced harassment laws and under-punished harassers, or whether in some cases companies are over-punishing, is one of the many topics our culture and institutions are currently working through.

So where does that leave Franken and Louis C.K.? Franken’s conduct, if it was at it appeared in the photo, was surely unwelcome — the woman whose breasts he allegedly grabbed was asleep. But it wasn’t in the workplace, and she was not protected by anti-discrimination laws. It was probably battery, however. We leave that call to prosecutors in the relevant jurisdiction (and here statutes of limitation have lapsed).

Louis C.K.’s behavior occurred (at least sometimes) in the workplace and might have been covered by anti-discrimination laws. That could depend on whether the women he forced to watch him masturbate were employees protected by anti-discrimination laws, or unprotected individuals including independent contractors or third parties. (Masturbating in front of people is not battery, which requires touching another person, but many states also have public nuisance and other laws that could be used, but only if the conduct had occurred in a public place.)

Perhaps the more important question raised by Damon’s semi-defense of Louis C.K. and Al Franken is whether these behaviors violate our collective social norms, rather than just whether they violate a particular civil or criminal law. It is true that, like legal penalties, social outrage should be proportional. While it can be tempting to throw up our hands and demand exile of all perpetrators of sexual misconduct, that wouldn’t be fair or reasonable.

Nonetheless, drawing a simplistic line in the sand between “prison” and “gross” really is not going to cut it. Groping is more than a joke — and quite often it’s a crime.

Joanna L. Grossman is the Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. Her most recent book is Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace. She is a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The wave of sexual-harassment scandals has led some commentators to suggest that the “Mike Pence rule” deserves a second look. In March, law professor Joanna Grossman explained why the rule is not just bad business practice: It may be illegal:

“I don’t work with women. If they’re attractive, I’m too tempted. And if they’re not attractive, what’s the point?”

A male partner at a law firm casually made this pronouncement one day at lunch, hardly looking up from his plate. Everyone laughed and went back to eating — in the rough-and-tumble world of DC law, it wasn’t even the most obnoxious thing said that day. But this is no laughing matter for the women whose career opportunities are impeded by men who cavalierly dismiss half of the labor force and insist that they’ve behaved honorably by doing so.

This issue was thrust into the news when the Washington Post ran a piece on Karen Pence, the wife of our current vice president, and reminded readers of something Mike Pence said in 2002: He does not eat alone with a woman or attend an event where alcohol is being served unless his wife is present. The Twittersphere lit up like a Christmas tree with jokes and rants about Pence’s wife-rule. It’s not clear whether Pence still adheres to this practice, but there are men who do.

As the Atlantic observes, such arrangements are especially common within marriages between religious conservatives of various stripes. (It need not be only men who follow such strictures, but the emphasis is often on male temptation.) On Capitol Hill, where long days and late nights away from the family are part of the job, some Congressmen will not travel alone in a car with a female staffer, the National Journal has reported. Some politicians set gender-neutral rules that have a side effect of keeping them from being alone with women — such as excluding any staff from the office before 7 am or after 7 pm — but others clearly apply special rules to women.

To be sure, a politician’s declining to dine alone with a woman does not fall in the same category as a law partner refusing to work with women (or at least musing about refusing to work with women). Nonetheless, the practice described by Pence in that 2002 interview is clearly illegal when practiced by a boss in an employment setting, and deeply damaging to women’s employment opportunities.

Title VII, which governs workplace discrimination, does not allow employers to treat people differently on the basis of certain protected characteristics, one of which is sex. This means that an employer cannot set the terms and conditions of employment differently for one gender than for the other. This includes any aspect of the relationship between employer and employees — extending to benefits like equal access to the employer.

By law, working dinners with the boss could be considered an opportunity to which both sexes must have equal access

Employers are not permitted to classify employees on the basis of gender without proof that sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for a particular job. A Pence-type rule could never satisfy this test. A male boss cannot casually cordon off certain jobs, tasks, or opportunities for men only. (I am assuming here that Pence does occasionally dine with men — table for two — without his wife present.)

Employers are also not permitted to base employment decisions on gender-based stereotypes — including the stereotype that women are temptresses, or incapable of having purely professional relationships with male bosses or co-workers.

Pence’s defenders said he was merely acting prudently, and expressed amazement at the all the fuss. Yet we know that women pay a heavy price for behavior that either resembles his or falls on the same continuum. We know this from anecdotal reports and surveys of women who report exclusion from travel, events, or one-on-one meetings with male bosses; from cases in which men have fired female subordinates to assuage jealous wives; and from decades of employment-discrimination litigation in which we get a picture of the everyday ways in which workplaces remain unequal for women.

Why might men refuse to work with women, either generally or one in particular? Some fear that temptation will cause them to overstep a marital boundary by having a consensual affair — or a legal boundary by engaging in unwelcome harassment. Others fear just the appearance of a sexual or romantic liaison — which could provoke wifely jealousy, concerns about sexual favoritism, or reputational harm to the male boss who might wrongfully be labeled a creep.

Some fear false accusations of sexual harassment, against which they can’t defend themselves because there aren’t any witnesses. Assuming these fears are legitimate (although some may be more about anxiety about women in leadership roles than marital fidelity), surely there are ways to alleviate them that do not curtail potentially productive business interactions?

The Iowa Supreme Court’s dubious ruling against the “hot hygienist”

An Iowa dentist made headlines a few years ago when he fired his longtime hygienist because his wife was jealous. The dentist directed sexually inappropriate comments at the (married) hygienist, complained that her scrubs were too tight and revealing, and asked questions about her sex life. The hygienist didn’t reciprocate with sexual innuendo, did not engage in a romantic or sexual relationship with the dentist, and put on a lab coat whenever he complained her clothing was “distracting.”

Nonetheless, the dentist fired the hygienist. The dentist’s wife viewed her as a “big threat” to their marriage, and the family pastor agreed that firing the “hot” hygienist was the best course of action. When the hygienist’s husband called the dentist to ask why his wife had been fired, the dentist reassured him that she was the best assistant he ever had and had done nothing wrong or inappropriate. But he was getting too attached and “feared he would try to have an affair with her down the road if he did not fire her.” In a shocking 7-0 opinion, in 2013, the Iowa Supreme Court held in Nelson v. Knight that the hygienist’s firing did not constitute sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Think for a moment about the absurdity of this ruling, given the existence of a statute that prohibits employers from making employment decisions because of an employee’s sex. Is there any doubt that Melissa Nelson could have kept her job if she was a man? The hygienist got fired for being an attractive woman, plain and simple. The court did not see it that way, characterizing her firing instead as something that grew out of a particular interpersonal relationship and situation, falling back on the right of an employer to fire an employee for any nondiscriminatory reason.

But even that deeply misguided court would understand that a policy or practice of excluding or avoiding female employees in general is unlawful. In its opinion, the Iowa Supreme Court distinguished between an “isolated employment decision based on personal relations … driven by individual feelings and emotions regarding a specific person” and a “decision based on gender itself.” And if an employer “repeatedly took adverse employment actions against persons of a particular gender, that would make it easier to infer that gender … was a motivating factor.”

Vice President Pence’s “policy” applies to all women — not just one in particular. That is why it runs afoul of Title VII.

Men who isolate themselves from women are in the thrall of stereotypes

Men needn’t isolate themselves from women in the workplace out of fears of false allegations of harassment. The vengeful, spurned woman who ruins an honorable man’s life (think Demi Moore in Disclosure) is a backlash caricature with an outsize impact on the popular imagination. False claims of harassment are exceedingly rare and impossible to prove; even meritorious claims of harassment are hard to prove. Men shouldn’t worry about being led unto temptation because, well, it is entirely within their control whether to harass a subordinate or initiate an affair.

We have a president who brags about grabbing women by the pussy — and a vice president who won’t even have dinner with them. These are two sides of the same coin, both reflecting the fundamentally unequal sphere working women inhabit because of male behavior.

As for the prototypical jealous wife? Perhaps some counseling is in order — and some self-reflection about why either partner in the marriage would perceive the relationship to be so vulnerable as to be undermined by the mere proximity of other women outside the wife’s presence. In any case, women in the workplace have protected civil rights that outweigh such concerns.

Women have been shut out of equal employment opportunity for all of history. It’s long past time the doors to power and opportunity were opened, whether after hours, on a trip, or, gasp, at a working dinner with a male boss. After all, as the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the musical Hamilton puts it, sometimes “decisions are happening over dinner.”

Joanna L. Grossman is the Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. Her most recent book is Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace. She is a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Bizarrely venturing into a controversy in which he was not otherwise involved, President Donald Trump told reporters for the New York Times last week that Bill O’Reilly “is a good person” and that he didn’t do “anything wrong.”

The comments came on the heels of the revelation that Fox News has settled with five women who claimed O’Reilly, the Fox megastar, sexually harassed them. According to the Times, payouts to these women, who worked for him or had been guests on his show, total about $13 million. The women complained, among other things, about lewd comments and phone calls, verbal abuse, and sexual overtures that led women to believe they would risk their careers by refusing him.

Of course, it’s legally irrelevant whether Trump thinks O’Reilly is a good person. But, in an important way, O’Reilly himself is secondary to this unfolding legal story. Under federal law, women (or men) who suffer from harassment generally gain redress by suing the employer, not the individual harasser.

So this is really a story about an employer, Fox News, and its owner, 21st Century Fox — entities that may have bought themselves silence and impunity in the short term, but set themselves up for legal Armageddon in the longer term. If the women with whom the network have settled are to be believed — note that false allegations are rare, and payoffs for false allegations even rarer — serial harassers abound at Fox News. (Let’s not forget Roger Ailes, who was ousted as Fox’s CEO in 2016 amid a high-profile sexual harassment scandal.)

And sexual harassment law is not just about preventing a theoretical first case of sexual harassment, but how, once alerted to a problem, a company responds to reduce the likelihood of a second or third case. To put it mildly, Fox News does not appear to fare well on that front.

There’s something of a paradox in the Fox situation. Each woman, by settling, has effectively signed away her right to a legal determination about what happened. And Fox has managed to minimize exposure by requiring, as a condition of her employment, arbitration (rather than lawsuits) and by imposing gag orders on the women as part of the settlement. The cases went away!

But as the number of these settlements rise, and now that they’ve become public, there’s a strong chance that future plaintiffs will point to them as evidence that the network has a policy of paying off victims of harassment: They show that Fox has the very opposite of a sound anti-sexual-harassment policy. Settlements may make sense in terms of a balance sheet: O’Reilly brings in many multiples of the money that Fox pays out to his accusers. But it’s a strategy that works until it suddenly doesn’t. And when it comes crashing down, the consequences could be legally and financially disastrous.

How the law assigns responsibility in sexual harassment cases

It took a while for the Supreme Court to lay out the contours of sexual harassment law. Federal sexual harassment law falls under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on certain protected characteristics, including sex. In a 1986 case, Meritor v. Vinson, the Supreme Court held that sexual harassment is a form of intentional sex discrimination that violates Title VII, and it recognized two forms of “actionable” harassment.

Quid pro quo harassment occurs when a person with supervisory authority threatens action against a subordinate to extract some type of sexual submission — “Sleep with me or you’re fired!” But harassment can also be actionable when an employee is subjected to unwelcome sexual conduct so severe or pervasive that it creates a hostile working environment.

Importantly, individual harassers (like, allegedly, Bill O’Reilly) cannot be held liable under Title VII. They can be subject to criminal prosecution if the misconduct involves assault, battery, rape, or any other act that is criminal as well as discriminatory. And they can sometimes be sued individually under a state anti-discrimination law; Gretchen Carlson, former Fox News host, directly sued Roger Ailes, although Fox News agreed to pay for his defense. The individual supervisor can potentially also be sued under a tort law that allows recovery for invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, and the like.

But by and large, sexual harassment claims are litigated by employees against employers. The crux of these cases typically involves the plaintiff trying to prove that the company can be held responsible for the behavior of someone it employs — someone who is (presumably) acting in violation of the company’s stated policies.

The Supreme Court clarified the rules on employer liability for harassment in two important cases in 1998 (Burlington Industries v. Ellerth and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton). For harassment that results in a “tangible” employment action (a version of quid pro quo harassment), it said that employers are strictly liable — meaning that the employer is responsible for the behavior, plain and simple.

But for hostile environment harassment, the rules of liability are more complicated. When a supervisor creates a hostile environment for a subordinate employee, the employer is automatically liable, but also has the chance to make an “affirmative defense.” If it can show that it has taken reasonable measures to prevent and correct the harassment problem, it might be able to avoid liability or damages.

The company doesn’t claim the harassment didn’t happen, but says that it did what any reasonable employer would have done to prevent the behavior from happening in the first place, and then responded to the problem once it did occur. (The victim is also obliged to take reasonable advantage of opportunities to minimize or avoid harm — reporting the incident to human resources, for instance.)

It’s going to be hard for Fox News to prove it took active steps to prevent a hostile work environment from developing

This is where Fox’s history of settlements — again, five of them, totaling $13 million — may come back to haunt it. What measures does a reasonable employer take to prevent and correct problems of harassment? It does the easy stuff like adopt a written policy prohibiting harassment and creating a grievance procedure for employees to file internal complaints. The employer might also train its employees, and especially its supervisors, about the law and the internal policy and about how to deal with harassment when it happens.

(It was revealed last week that, to the amazement of 21st Century Fox employees, its human resources department has been using audio of President Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” conversation in training sessions to illustrate one kind of unacceptable behavior. The choice seemed odd, given that Fox News commentators have defended Trump, and given that Trump has inserted himself into the O’Reilly situation.)

But guidelines and training sessions are not enough. Employers also must show that they have responded promptly and effectively to complaints of harassment, conducted thorough investigations, protected employees from retaliation, and taken disciplinary measures to minimize the likelihood of future problems.

We don’t know (or at least I don’t know) what happened between O’Reilly and each of those women. And the reason we don’t know is because Fox News settled the cases quietly and imposed those gag orders. Is it possible that Fox News settled these cases even though Bill O’Reilly did not do anything wrong? Sure, but it’s highly unlikely. Harassment cases are notoriously hard for plaintiffs to win — federal discrimination complainants prevail only 15 percent of the time, a lower win rate than in any other type of civil lawsuit. And employers are loath to encourage complaints by being too quick or generous with payouts.

But take a step back and look at what the picture of settlements presents of Fox’s policies for dealing with sexual harassment allegations. Even though each individual woman has effectively relinquished her claim, the lawsuits suggest a pattern of behavior by Fox News as well as by O’Reilly. Several new lawsuits have been filed, including one by former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, which alleges that Fox News is “operated like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency, and misogyny.”

How might the pattern of settlements factor into this or other lawsuits? Since arbitrators are supposed to apply the same governing law as courts, automatic liability applies. If actionable behavior by O’Reilly is deemed likely to have occurred, Fox News will have to present the affirmative defense, outlining the anti-harassment measures it has taken.

Fox News’s parent company is now investigating the claims against O’Reilly — but Fox News was obliged to do that from the start

Fox News would likely argue that the settlements mean nothing — that the payoffs were based on a decision that it would be cheaper to settle than to defend against the claim or suffer whatever bad publicity might attend such a defense. Nonetheless, after it learned of a claim, Fox News had the responsibility to investigate and determine what action was necessary to resolve it and to prevent future ones.

The burden will the therefore be on the company to prove in any case involving O’Reilly (or Ailes, for that matter) that it determined — both for that case and in the earlier ones — that no harassment occurred, or that it imposed proper disciplinary or corrective measures to minimize the risk of repeat harassment.

It strains belief to think that Fox News would pay one woman $9 million, as it did, in one case, if it concluded that her claims were unfounded. And there has been no outward evidence that O’Reilly has faced sanctions, such as suspension.

What’s more, 21st Century Fox announced just this week that it had hired a firm to investigate at least one of the claims against O’Reilly, which strongly suggests that Fox News had not done so already. Given this track record, Fox News simply won’t be able to mount the affirmative defense, causing its odds of losing to skyrocket.

Moreover, Fox News may not get away with its strategy of keeping these claims out of open court. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission retains the power to sue an employer and seek both injunctive relief (an order, say, requiring the employer to take particular measures to deal with the problem of harassment) and victim-specific damages, even if every individual employee has agreed to mandatory arbitration of discrimination claims.

The EEOC can sue to vindicate the public’s interest in nondiscriminatory employment, and it doesn’t have to abide by employment agreements that attempt to substitute arbitration for litigation. Of course, the EEOC is under Trump’s authority, so his views of O’Reilly’s goodness may come into play after all. But politics aside, this is exactly the type of case that merits EEOC intervention.

And the kicker for Fox News is this: Employers are protected from punitive damages in harassment cases — the kind that can really hurt a big company’s bottom line — only if they can show that a supervisor’s misconduct was contrary to the employer’s good-faith efforts to comply with Title VII. (Title VII has a cap on damages, but many state anti-discrimination laws, under which these claims can also be litigated, do not.)

Fox News’s practice of settling, secreting away, and ignoring doesn’t have a prayer of satisfying this standard. And this isn’t just a problem for future complaints involving O’Reilly. In sending a message to its employees that it tolerates harassment, Fox News has made itself vulnerable to a greater likelihood of liability, compensatory damages, and punitive damages in all harassment cases involving all supervisors for the near future.

When Ailes was ousted (with his $40 million exit payout), Fox News issued a statement that it would not tolerate conduct that “disrespects women or contributes to an uncomfortable work environment.” Fine words, but can the company prove it in court?

Workplace equality is not usually best brought about by the free market. But it might be a form of rough justice that, if money kept O’Reilly in his position till now, money may eventually bring him down. In just a few days, more than a dozen companies withdrew expensive ads from The O’Reilly Factor. Still, such an outcome would be no substitute for a well-functioning, anti-discrimination law. The O’Reilly scandal is in part an indictment of our current legal system.

Employers should be able — encouraged, even — to settle harassment claims. It’s a good way to provide redress to a victim-employee who has been harmed by the harassment. But employers shouldn’t be able to use arbitration and secret settlements to protect highly paid employees with a history of harassment.

Fox News’s approach to sexual harassment complaints may well be headed toward a costly explosion.

Correction: This piece originally incorrectly characterized the Fox News settlements. Fox News has indeed reached settlements with five women, but not all the complaints involved lawsuits. Also, it was 21st Century Fox, the parent company — not Fox News — that this week commissioned an investigation of a claim against O’Reilly.

Joanna L. Grossman is the Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. Her most recent book is Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace. She is a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.