US defense firms are to be barred from lucrative government contracts if they refuse to allow employees access to the courts, after a woman working for a Halliburton subsidiary in Iraq was prevented from taking legal action over an alleged gang rape by fellow workers.
Al Franken, the Senate’s newest member, has won an amendment to the defense appropriations bill prompted by the case of Jamie Leigh Jones. She alleged that she was drugged and raped by seven US contractors in Baghdad in 2005.
Jones, who was employed by KBR, which was fighting oil fires, said that a pattern of subsequent behavior by the firm, including allegedly locking her in a container under armed guard and losing forensic evidence, amounts to a cover-up.
Halliburton/KBR used a clause in her contract requiring disputes to be settled by arbitration to block legal action — a policy which, her lawyer said, has encouraged assaults by creating a climate of impunity.
Franken described it as a denial of justice.
“Contractors are using fine print to deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court,” he said in a Senate debate.
In legal papers Jones, who was 20 at the time, said she was fed a knockout drug while drinking with KBR firefighters.
“When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again,” the papers said.
Jones was treated by a US army doctor who gave forensic evidence to company officials. She said the firm placed her under guard in a shipping container and she was released only after her father asked the US embassy to intervene. When the forensic evidence was handed to investigators two years later, crucial photographs and notes were missing.
Jones said she identified one of the men who attacked her after he confessed, but that Halliburton/KBR prevented her from taking legal action against him or the company by pointing to a clause in her contract requiring disputes to go to arbitration.
She told a Senate committee: “I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant, or that I would eventually end up in this horrible situation.”
Her lawyer, Todd Kerry, said that by forcing earlier assault cases to arbitration, Halliburton and other defense firms had created a climate in which some workers came to believe they could get away with sexual assaults and other crimes.
“Had there been public scrutiny to prevent such things happening and these cases taken to court, they might not have been repeated.
Instead one of the men who raped Jamie was so confident that nothing would happen that he was lying in bed next to her the morning after,” Kerry said.
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