Washington’s Leading #MeToo Lawyer Is A 30-year Veteran Of Harassment Law

Early in her career Debra Katz worked alongside sexual harassment law pioneer Catharine MacKinnon on the groundbreaking 1986 Supreme Court case that defined the concept and made it actionable. Since then she has become “DC’s leading #MeToo lawyer,” says this article in Washingtonian. It was the 1986 case, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, that established that “consent” was intrinsically problematic in a hierarchical employment setting and that a viable sexual harassment charge did not require proof of economic damages. Some of Katz’s recent cases have made headlines, including one that targeted a celebrity chef and another a top executive at National Public Radio, but she specializes “in a kind of sexual-harassment case that’s very different from those propelling #MeToo: ones that most of us will never even hear about.”