This Woman Sued Her Company And Won $3.2 Million

In 1991, Tameron Keyes was fresh out of grad school and eager to find a job in finance. So when she was offered a job as a lowly cold caller — calling potential investors on behalf of a broker — at Shearson Lehman Brothers, a Los Angeles firm connected to Smith Barney, she eagerly accepted to get her foot in the door. Eleven years later, her employer was ordered to pay her $3.2 million as compensation for egregious sexual harassment and discrimination. Keyes recently wrote a memoir about her experience called “No Backing Down.” And since she never signed a confidentiality agreement, she’s free to tell her story from start to finish — including the beyond-crude slurs she was confronted with almost daily, why she turned down a $100,000 settlement with no guarantee she’d ever see a penny if she went to trial, and what it was like to confront her boss the day she won her case. I spoke with her earlier this week.

So let’s get right to it. Did the harassment take place right in the open?

Oh, yeah, it was an everyday kind of thing. For example, I was walking down the hallway one day, and on one side there were desks three deep with guys in them cold-calling. … I was walking by and another guy came out, walking with me. Someone in a desk calls out, “Hey Tameron! I could f— you so hard you’d have to hold your guts in with a two by four!” I looked at he guy with me and he was just like, “Never mind.”

That is unbelievable.

Another time, I’m waiting for the elevator in one of those hallways with banks of elevators on each side. I’m standing there with two other people. Our sales manager comes through, walking from one end to the other. And he calls out to the one broker, “You gonna nail ‘em both tonight.?” It was just everyday and normal.

Another day, I’m sitting my cubicle, and one guy comes in and shouts to another, “Hey, did you do and fudge-packing last night?” I said, “Shut up!” They’re shouting, because the more abusive and macho you can be, the more impressive you are. The guy next to me said, “If you can’t take it, get out.” It’s not like I was this wimpy little thing! It was just really in-your-face and aggressive and constant. And it was management, too. When our sales manager went out for lunch, they’d show porno movies in the office, with 20 or 30 guys — and the offices were glass.

So what was your mindset while all this was going on?

There’s nothing you can do! You can’t do anything. It becomes a decision of: How badly do you want this job? How do you see yourself in the future, and how are you going to reach that goal? Is this going to be worth it? You have to decide how badly you want it. The reason there are very few women on the investment side of banking is stories like this. Women have to swim upstream, and they get tired.

Did you take any steps to leave at any point before the lawsuit?

You know, there are asshole guys, and there are nice guys. If it weren’t for men, I wouldn’t have gotten out. … People were coming to me saying, “Tameron, go get another job” [because a particular manager had been saying he was going to fire her.] Another broker said, “Don’t run away with your tail between your legs. Call HR.” I naively believed him. I called HR, and the woman was really nasty, and that made me really alarmed. I went back to Columbia alumni resources to find a women’s organization, which helped me negotiate with the branch manager. It was a whole series of negotiations; they were trying to find out what I knew and how likely it was that I would sue them. And they ended up moving me to another branch [which didn’t stop the problem].

Eventually a Chicago law firm launched a class-action suit that became known as the “Boom-Boom Room” case, involving almost 2,000 women. How did you join up with that suit?

I was about to quit. I was at my wit’s end with this manager who was successfully grinding me down. Then I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal [about the lawsuit] that mentioned the firm and the city they were in. I called information in Chicago, asked for the name of the law firm, and I called them up. I called them thinking I just wanted information. … But a partner came on the phone and when I told the story I just lost it. She stayed on the phone with me for at least an hour. And she said, “Tameron, do you want me to get him to stop?” And that finally convinced me.

What happened once you decided to sign on?

It was a three-round process. The first round, you said what happened to you, what your claim was, and then they came back to those women with an offer and a confidentiality agreement. They offered me something like $9,000 — piddly, ridiculous. So if you refused that, then you went to mediation. … You’d negotiate a settlement, and they were supposed to come to this mediation open to any amount. …. We quickly figured out they had a $100,000 cap. My lawyer got really mad and we actually walked out.

So you decided not to settle when they made you an offer? That’s a huge gamble, because you could end up with nothing instead of what they were offering you.

I tried to settle with them! But they were being such jerks, so disingenuous, such liars, so unfair. They never copped to how they treated me, and how they treated other people. To this day they haven’t apologized. So the decision for me was, “Can I live with myself if I scurry into the closet? Do I stand up for my own dignity and maybe fail, or never try?” So it wasn’t even a matter of how hard it was going to be. It was about self-respect.

You ended up winning big — $3.2 million. Did you quit as soon as that happened?

No! I was at home when it happened … My lawyer called me on Friday and I had won. The first person I called was my dad, then a few other people. Then my brother called me and said he’d try to call me at the office, but my phone rang 20 times. I lived close to my office, so I stomped over there right away … I turned around, and there’s my new boss. (My old boss was fired, or “retired.”) I walked up and said “I just won three and a half million dollars, and someone’s not answering my phone.”

Ahh, that’s amazing! What did he do?

He put his hands up, like it was a stick-up, and said, “I had nothing to do with it!”

What was it like going to back to work after that?

You know, a lot of people were really happy for me, and a few were burning angry.

You stayed at work for several more years, and then eventually you did step away. Now that the dust has settled, what have you learned?

I used to be someone not that interested in feminist issues. I thought, “I’m a feminist, but I don’t need to sit around and talk about it.” … So i knew peripherally that these issues where out there, but I didn’t pay attention. Once my book came out, I started paying attention to articles about women’s issues, and I learned a lot. What I keep encountering are these prescriptions: “Women need to negotiate,” “Women need to ask for raises,” “Women need to get mentors,” things like that.

Hey, that’s what this site says!

Right! But it is not going solve everything. … There are many, many women out there who are experienced, who know how to negotiate, who can fill those positions, but they’re not at the upper levels because of stories like mine. I’m sure there are some women who need to learn to speak up. But the core issue is discrimination, which is not economically rational. We’re not going to get anywhere without throwing our weight around.