Eugene Scalia Once Represented a Big Bank in a Sexual Harassment Case. It Got Ugly.

In a 2015 deposition, the Labor Secretary nominee highlighted a victim’s sexual history and intimated that she schemed to win a payday.



Anyone who has covered financial reform had a flash of recognition when Donald Trump nominated Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court justice, as the next Labor Secretary. Scalia, a partner at the white-shoe law firm Gibson Dunn, has been the hired gun of the financial industry in its often successful attempts to soften the blow of Dodd-Frank.

Scalia was the lead attorney challenging the “position limits” rule meant to rein in speculation on oil contracts. He got the courts to throw out the “proxy access” rule that enabled shareholders to propose alternative candidates for corporate boards of directors. He led the fight to toss Dodd-Frank’s “extractive industries” rule, which would have required oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose all payments above $100,000 made to foreign governments. He represented MetLife in the company’s successful effort to shed a designation as a “systemically important financial institution.” And most recently, he was the lead counsel against the Department of Labor—the agency he’s poised to run— in the case that killed the “fiduciary rule,” which would have forced investment advisers to operate in the best interest of their clients.

He also helped block the Labor Department’s workplace ergonomics rule in the 1990s, which Democratic Senators held against him when they blocked George W. Bush’s effort to install him as the Labor Department’s solicitor general. Eventually, Scalia got a recess appointment.

Putting the most prominent legal challenger to agency regulations in charge of an agency that makes regulations is bad enough. But Scalia’s lower-profile work for a big bank might prove just as relevant to his confirmation. In 2015, Scalia briefly represented mega-bank HSBC in a sexual harassment case involving several of its current and former employees. In a deposition with the harassment victim, Scalia repeatedly brought her to tears, not so subtly accusing her of promiscuity and scheming to extract money from the bank.

Read more: https://prospect.org/article/eugene-scalia-once-represented-big-bank-sexual-harassment-case-it-got-ugly
(American Prospect)