Sharon Bialek: A Jumble of Contradictions

Sharon Bialek in her appropriately
somber black dress, well below the knees,
ready to take on the corporate world. Yet
look at the ruffles on the side of the dress,
which match her cascading blond hair (which
takes a lot of grooming to achieve that look).
Although her jewellery is a restrained silver
instead of gold, the long chain still
glamorizes the dark dress.

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I wonder why Sharon Bialek really decided to come forward. What kind of thoughts did she harbor after all these years (fifteen) about her business date/dinner gone wrong (if you read the accounts I've linked to below, that's what it sounds like)? What did she really mean to do to Herman Cain by throwing a fifteen-year-old story onto his presidential tracks? Is it anger, envy, self-pity, indignation? A whim? Some politically correct sexual harassment angle to her story which she suddenly picked up?

In any case, she's a myriad of contradictions (or contradicting reports). She's a corporate careerist who has been through nine employers in seventeen years. She's a single mother who lives with a "fiance" who is not the father of her thirteen-year-old son. She's a well-spoken woman who cannot help the "little girl" tilt in her voice. She's a career woman who dresses in conservative dark clothes, yet has a mop of disheveled blond hair and heavy make-up more appropriate for a bordello. She's a strong woman who cannot handle the advances of a lusty black man, despite her many come-ons.

The report here says that she's a "single mother," that holy, sacrosanct position of the modern world, with a thirteen-year-old son, and that he (her thirteen-year-old son!) told her to "do the right thing."

Bialek said that one of the reasons she came forward to tell her story was that her 13-year-old son thought she should. "My biggest fan is my son. .... I called him and I said, 'Nick, what do you think I should do?'" He said, 'Mom, you have to do the right thing. I think you need to tell on him.'"

"That confirmed it for me," Bialek said. "If my son is saying it I want to be the role model for him and for other kids growing up that this is not appropriate behavior."

There's something infantile (and creepy) about asking the opinion of your teenage son about reporting a sexual incident.

Her "fiance" Mark Harwood, to whom she has been engaged for a year and has lived with for three, says:

He will stand by his fiancée and believes coming out publicly was a 'gutsy' thing to do.

From the Chicago Tribune:

"It's not an anti-political thing. It's not a money thing," said Harwood, who shares a large, five-bedroom home with Bialek in north suburban Mundelein. "She's just trying to do the right thing, and that takes guts."

Bialek's fiance, however, denied she had any current money problems. Harwood, a corporate executive in the medical equipment industry, said he supports her financially so she can stay at home with her 13-year-old son from a previous relationship.

The independent, corporate career woman, according to Gloria Allred, has actually been living off a "fiance" (only for a year under that category, the previous three years he was just a boyfriend with whom she shacked up), acting the "stay-at-home" mom for a grown, teenage son, who is not even the child of this current boyfriend.

This from the Chicago Tribune:

Bialek has not had a job outside the home in about two years, according to her attorney, Gloria Allred.

Here is information about her son from WLS-TV Chicago:

In 1999, Bialek's son Nicholas was born and a paternity lawsuit was filed by the father, a media executive.

Which implies that the son was born out-of-wedlock, by another man, not her current live-in boyfriend.

And from abc.com, Harwood defends his mistress:

"She's of the same political persuasion as Herman Cain," Harwood said. "There was no money on the table to go and have an interview. This is truly about an American girl who's got a big heart and wants to do the right thing.

An American girl (age fifty) who's got a big heart and wants to do the right thing!

Although her professional life is long, with many managerial positions, she seems to have a pattern of leaving jobs after short durations. Chicago's WLS-TV reports that:

Bialek's resume and a trail of public records indicates that changing jobs has been a regular occurrence for the Chicagoan. She has worked for at least nine different employers over the past 17 years and appears to have struggled financially.

Gloria Allred (speaking at this news conference) lists Bialek's corporate career path that spans a couple of decades, apparently full of illustrious positions and achievements. But a closer look shows that Bialek, in many instances, stays very short periods with her employers before changing jobs. It's not clear how many times she got fired and how many times she left her various jobs. Her position at the National Restaurant Association appears to have lasted a short six months before she was "terminated," which sounds like a firing.

New York Post reports:

Sharon Bialek...worked for a branch of the National Restaurant Association (NRA) before being terminated in 1997...

More from the Daily Caller:

"We can confirm that Sharon Bialek was employed by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation from 12/30/96 – 6/20/97," Sue Hensley, a spokeswoman for the National Restaurant Association, said in an email to The DC.

In her formal statement at the recent news conference, she says that she met Cain at a Tea Party convention in 1997. She knew him from her time with the National Restaurant Association. She asked him if he could help her with getting her job back (which she'd lost in June 1997). She looks friendly, attractive, and even enticing, if her news conference hair and make-up are any indication. Cain might have got the wrong signals. She accepted a ride with him. He made advances in the car. She rejected them. He stopped. And now she's reporting it as sexual harassment.

Lawrence Auster, at the View From the Right (VFR), has several posts on Bialek, as well as many on the ongoing Cain story. I agree with his answer to Laura Wood's comment. I don't think Auster is engaging in sophistry, or parsing [the story] from a partisan perspective, as another VFR reader, Jim C., has commented, but is trying to work between fine lines. Below are the interactions:

Laura Wood:

I think you are engaging in uncharacteristic sophistry on this issue. Regardless of how permissive modern liberalism is, the issue is whether, provided the accusations are true, conservatives consider Cain's actions improper. And they should consider them improper. He is not a suitable candidate if he is guilty of such reckless, illicit behavior.

Lawrence Auster:

Let's say for the sake of discussion that it was true. Fifteen years ago as a private individual he got excited by a woman and crudely groped her, including making a gesture pushing her toward oral sex. That offends me. The obsession with oral sex is a mark of the debasement of our culture. But I don't see how that one incident by itself 15 years ago would disqualify a man for the presidency.

You say that the wrongness of the left is not the issue here, but only what we think is right. But as I've said here, this issue is mainly not about our views of private morality but about what standards control our public life. Your position and Leonard's adds up to allowing the left to give a pass to outrageous sexual behavior by Democratic politicians, while we are ready to destroy a Republican candidate for one attempted and not-completed adultery in the distant past.

It's an impossibly complicated issue because of the way the left keeps jerking us around. I am aware that my position is not perfect and can be criticized. But it seems to me that the alternatives are worse.

Here's the interaction with Jim C.:

Jim C. writes:

I have to disagree strongly with your take. If Bialek's version of events is true, Cain sexually assaulted her. And I wish you wouldn't parse this case from a partisan perspective; some of us still believe that moral judgment is as important in business as it is in any other aspect of life. This woman believed that Cain was an ethical businessman, and what she discovered was a perv with affirmative action mojo.

LA replies:

Parsing it from a partisan perspective is the very thing I have not been doing. Unlike the Republicans who have been all-out defending Cain from the charges, I OPPOSE his candidacy. I'm not saying that moral judgment does not matter. I am saying that given the actual ruling morality in American public life, which the liberals have imposed on us, Cain's 15 year old alleged sexual assault, which evidently lasted about five seconds before he stopped and left Bialek alone, is not disqualifying in my opinion. If there were more such behavior by him, and more serious behavior, then it would be disqualifying. But this one incident, assuming it is true, does not rise to that level.

Bialek went into a situation (flirting with a male she didn't really know very well, apart from conversations at meetings) that she didn't know the outcome of. Flirtatious, or sexual, invitations to any male have unforeseen consequences. Different men deal with these interactions differently. And different races too. I find that black men are much more eager to take anything (a smile, a mild hello) in a flirtatious or sexual light, and to proceed with their advances.

Perhaps there was a racial (forbidden, unknown) element to Bialek's behavior (flirtatious, etc.) towards Cain, and not only the attraction of a powerful man.

She should have just licked her wounds, cut her losses, and started afresh. But given her strange private life, I don't think she had anything "fresh" to start over with. In any case, I think she did herself harm, probably more harm than Cain did since he can always go back to running his businesses if his presidential bid doesn't pan out.