So before we jump into your work specifically in the legal space with workplace retaliation, I want to take a moment to talk through maybe a moment in your career where you were the one who maybe jumped to some conclusions or... approach leadership in a way that maybe that could have resulted in some very negative consequences that feel like retaliation or some kind of discrimination.

Sure.

There's one that comes to mind, and it still kind of haunts me to this day a little bit.

If I could Monday morning quarterback, go back and do it differently, I would.

But it was during my time in the Navy.

I was enlisted back in 2005 to 2009.

That's when I was in.

So talk to me a little bit about, because that moment felt, you thought you were doing the right thing, but what did it cost you in that moment?

Is that what matters? Is it how you experience the thing? Or is it the actual words they use? Or is it a combo of both? Yeah.

So it's a combination of both.

Right.

Under the law, there's a subjective analysis, which is how the person's perceiving it.

But objectively, is the behavior raising to the level of discrimination? Right.

Because just because somebody perceives something to be discriminatory doesn't necessarily mean a reasonable person looking at it from the outside, looking in would see it that way.

Right.

What patterns do you see? What separates winning cases from ones that don't?

How do you respond to that?

Again, I, I, I disagree and, and it's for the court to decide.

The case is fate literally on this question of whether this was art or whether this was a sexual assault, and I just, I completely disagree as legal counsel that somebody actually has to be forcing her to have oral sex with him in order for this to be sexual assault.

You can emulate certain things and it can still rise to the level of sexual assault.

It can still rise to the level of an assault, which is ...

It doesn't even have to be a sexual assault under the Gender Motivated Violence Act, by the way.

If we prove that this was an assault because she was a woman, we still meet our burden of proof.

Mm