Court: Sexual harassment not an invasion of privacy
By Associated Press
Published September 19, 2003
TALLAHASSEE - A secretary who says her former boss sexually harassed her doesn't have grounds to sue him for invasion of privacy, a divided state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The case did not involve the privacy provision of the Florida Constitution, but rather the "common law" right to privacy recognized in court rulings over the years.
Florida's high court first recognized that legal concept of privacy in 1944, when author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was sued by a person she described in a book. That case was cited in Thursday's unsigned 4-3 opinion.
"The plaintiff alleged that the book personally violated her right to privacy by exposing private facts about her to the public," the opinion said.
Although few courts at the time considered privacy an independent right, the Florida Supreme Court recognized it as one.
And the concept has expanded. Since then, "invasion of privacy" has come to also mean intruding into a person's home or personal quarters, creating a false impression of someone in the public eye and exploiting the commercial value of someone's name.
But in Thursday's opinion, the court majority rejected the idea that initiating unwelcome physical contact is the equivalent of intruding into someone's private quarters.
That position was advanced by lawyers for Elaine Scarfo, who accused Victor Ginsberg of subjecting her to "unwelcome offensive conduct, including physical touching and comments of a sexual nature."
The lawsuit was dismissed first in federal court and then in state court before it landed in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. That court sent it to the Florida Supreme Court to answer the question of whether the common law right in Florida to sue for invasion of privacy extends to sexual harassment.
It doesn't, Florida's high court said Thursday.
"The intrusion to which this refers is into a "place' in which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy and is not referring to a body part," the court wrote.
Justices Charles Wells, Kenneth Bell, R. Fred Lewis and Leander Shaw made up the majority. Chief Justice Harry Lee Anstead and Justices Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince dissented.
"The alleged victim was obviously not "left alone,' and her privacy was violated in the most personal and intimate way," Anstead wrote in the dissent. "... This issue should not even be a close call."
