UC Berkeley professor faces sex assault suit
A former UC Berkeley employee claims in a lawsuit that a prominent philosophy professor groped and sexually harassed her last year, then fired her when she complained.
Joanna Ong, a 2014 graduate of UC Berkeley, was hired in July to work as a research assistant to John Searle, 84, and as a consultant at UC Berkeley’s John Searle Center for Social Ontology, according to the complaint, which says Ong had taken a class of Searle’s and had developed an interest in philosophy. Searle retired in July 2014 but, as a professor emeritus, kept offices on campus and retained other privileges.
The lawsuit, filed this week in Alameda Coun-
ty Superior Court against the professor and the University of California regents, seeks unspecified damages. It says Ong ,was on the job for about a week when Searle asked another employee to leave the room and locked the door behind her.
The suit says he then “slid his hands down the back of (Ong’s) spine to her buttocks and told Ong that ‘they were going to be lovers.’ ” Searle also said he had an “emotional commitment to making her a public intellectual” and that he would “love her for a long time,” the suit says.
Ong, 24, rejected the sexual advance and Searle apologized, she says in her suit.
Carla Hesse, head of UC Berkeley’s response team on sexual harassment, has reviewed the lawsuit but declined to comment. Campus officials forwarded a copy of UC’s sexual harassment policy.
That policy was revised in January 2016, as several cases of sexual harassment came to light at UC Berkeley in which administrators only lightly disciplined high-profile faculty members until the incidents received public scrutiny. These included a famous astronomer, an executive vice chancellor and the dean of the law school.
In November, The Chronicle reported on UC Berkeley findings that a prominent architecture professor, Nezar AlSayyad, had sexually harassed a student.
Unlike that student, Ong did not file a formal complaint with the university but hired a lawyer instead. But she says in her suit that she tried to tell the university about the problem.
Ong says she first reported the incident to the Searle Center’s director, Jennifer Hudin in early August. The suit says Hudin told her that Searle had prior sexual relationships with his students in exchange for money or academic benefits, and that she would protect Ong from Searle’s advances.
But the suit alleges that “no one working for Searle advised Ong that she should report the assault to upper management at UC Berkeley.”
Neither Hudin nor Searle responded to a request for comment. UC Berkeley officials said Thursday that the retired professor was paid to teach a course this semester “but is not currently teaching.”
Ong was traveling and could not be reached for comment, said her attorney, John Kristensen, who in January won a record $1.15 million settlement from UC for a UC Santa Cruz student who said she’d been raped by a professor.
Ong’s suit alleges that Searle persisted in creating a “hostile and awkward” work environment.
At work, the professor occasionally encouraged Ong to log in to a “Sugar Baby, Sugar Daddy” website, which she declined to do, the suit says. One day, Ong, who is Asian American, referred to “American imperialism.” She says Searle replied: “American imperialism? Oh, boy, that sounds great, honey! Let’s go to bed and do that right now!”
Ong’s suit says that Searle also watched pornography in front of her and in view of students walking by his office. She says he also had her read and respond to flirtatious emails as part of her job.
Searle, who lectured on free will and rationality during his long career at UC Berkeley, is a prolific author of books on philosophy, including “Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization” in 2010, and “Rationality in Action” in 2001. He received the National Humanites Medal in 2004.
According to the suit, Searle had agreed to pay Ong $4,000 a month for both jobs and cut her pay to $1,500 a month after the incidents.
In early September, Ong complained again to Hudin, the center’s director. The suit says Hudin promised to report the problems to UC Berkeley’s upper management but later admitted she did not “because she needed to ‘protect him.’ ”
Ong was fired from both jobs on Sept. 23, 2016, the suit says.