MARIENTAL - The proceedings of the newly-founded Namibian Inquiry on Protecting Property, Livelihood and Environment on Friday, 23rd August, were jarringly interrupted by a summon for Dr Laura Macalister Brown, the Principal Researcher At Namibia Desert Elephant Conservation. In a completely unprecedented charge, Brown is being sued for an undisclosed amount by a Ms Yolanda Jennifer for an invasion of privacy of the women employed by the Namibia Desert Elephant Conservation.
Jennifer alleges that Brown had recently asked her personal secretary for the personal emails of all the women employed by the Namibia Desert Elephant Conservation, which constitutes an invasion of privacy. When confronted with this during the committee session, Brown had initially claimed ignorance, then innocence for her actions.
When asked to testify, Brown had clarified her actions by saying that she and the other women in the organization had been repeatedly sexually harassed by the CEO of the organization, and inspired by the ‘#MeToo Nigeria’ movement, she had been emboldened to speak up about the harassment and had intended to get the emails in order to contact her fellow colleagues about the harassment, in a bid to get them to jointly sign a petition testifying against their CEO. Brown did not comment on whether she thought that asking for the organization’s email list in private was the right move.
However, further questioning by officials had revealed that the organization did not have a CEO, but instead another principal investigator, and they threatened to sue Brown on another charge of falsifying information on a testimony, to which Brown clarified that she had merely misspoke and that she was indeed referring to the other principal investigator, likely to be Dr Rob R Ramey II. And in a twist, officials had discovered that Dr Ramey was in actuality, Brown’s husband, and thus asked her to clarify if her claims of ‘sexual harassment’ were actually harassment, or a ‘mere husband-and-wife feud’.
Brown took offence to this, and though initially feigning ignorance, maintained that she and Ramey were not ‘husband and wife’ as they were to be divorced, and that all sexual harassment had occured in a workplace setting and had involved other employees as well.
In a private interview later, Brown had expressed her distress at the current situation, and maintained that she had good intentions in helping all the women in her organization fight for justice, while pleading for others to help spread her plight and raise awareness of the falsehoods being propogated.
More tribunals for this case are to be scheduled in court at a later date.
We at Catholic News Agency stand by our Catholic values, where respect for other persons should be upheld at all times, and by extension sexual harassment will absolutely not be accepted. Should Brown’s allegations be true, we offer our support to her and the other women who had faced such discrimination.
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