Speak Out Act

Other states may have different statutes, and a federal law may impose additional restri-restrictions in a particular circumstance.

For example, the Federal Speak Out Act restricts the enforceability of certain pre-dispute non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses involving sexual assault or sexual harassment disputes.

Its application depends on the circumstances and statutory requirements.

This is why a lawyer should not just look at an NDA and see the word confidential and assume that every restriction is valid.

You helped secure some major legislation.

The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault Act was one of them and the Speak Out Act.

This can kind of be confusing because a lot of us do not read the fine print when we start a new job or sign a contract.

So explain the magnitude of what those pieces of legislation do for workers.

So if you're racially discriminated against at work or you face gender discrimination or age or disability and you signed a forced arbitration clause, you still have to go to that secret chamber.

I'm working on it, but I haven't gotten there yet.

The Speak Out Act is the second law, and that gets rid of the second evil in my term of what's an evil of silencing people at work, which are nondisclosure agreements or nondisparagement agreements.

And so the same thing for sexual misconduct survivors.

Getting rid of those closed door settlements.

And they followed that with the Speak Out Act, which heavily restricted the use of pre-dispute NDAs, the exact legal gags that enforced the Whisper Network to begin with.

Exactly.

So what does this all mean for the listener? Why should they care about civil look-back windows? I mean, if I'm managing a business or sitting on the board of a corporation, this shift in the civil landscape is genuinely terrifying.

He voted against the Break the Cycle of Violence Act.

He voted against the Speak Out Act.

He voted against the Equal Pay for Team USA Act, and he did not vote at all on preventing maternal deaths at Reauthorization Act.

Which means that when it comes to even what it is he's willing to do for women, and Black women are featured prominently in each of these pieces of legislation because as women, we deal with the racial implications of white people being racist against Black people.

And I really wanted to start by saying thank you for all the work that you have done on behalf of women.

I think that just in the wake of your successful lawsuit against then-Fox chairman Roger Ailes, you worked tirelessly to bring the secure passage of the bipartisan, the ending forced arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, and then also the the Speak Out Act that both signed in 2022.

Yes, and we should have thought of a better name for the first

one.

I mean, this is like the biggest change in labor law in the last 100 years to give people their rights.

You know, it's why it's been so important.

And then the Speak Out Act gets rid of predisputing.

NDAs.