"Washington Post
Posted at 10:29 AM ET, 11/09/2011
Cain accusers Bialek, Kraushaar planning joint news conference
By James V. Grimaldi
Two women who allege they were sexually harassed by presidential hopeful Herman Cain have agreed to hold a joint news conference so they can air their stories together, the attorney for one of the women said.
Joel P. Bennett, who represents 55-year-old federal employee Karen Kraushaar, said he was planning the news conference with Gloria Allred, who represents Chicago homemaker Sharon Bialek, 50.
Details of the joint appearance have not been worked out. Kraushaar’s name became public on Tuesday, but she has not described her alleged harassment by Cain when she was working at the National Restaurant Association more than a decade ago. Bialek went public Monday, accusing Cain of groping her in a car after the two dined together in Washington in 1997. She was seeking job advice from Cain, who was head of the association at that time.
Cain forcefully denied the sexual harassment allegations at a news conference in Arizona on Tuesday.
Kraushaar left the restaurant association as part of a settlement of her harassment complaint, Bennett has said. She went on to work in communications for the federal government--first for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and most recently in the Treasury Department’s office of the inspector general.
On Wednesday, Kraushaar confirmed a report by the Associated Press that she also filed a workplace complaint at INS. The complaint asserted that she had not been allowed to work from home after a serious car accident, and also accused a manager of circulating a sexually charged joke about men and women via e-mail.
The e-mail complaint involved an explicit joke that has been widely circulated on the Internet, a former superviser told the AP on condition of anonymity. The joke lists reasons men and women are supposedly like computers, including that “in order to get men’s attention, you have to turn them on,” and that women are like computers because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”
Kraushaar told the AP she considered her employment complaint “relatively minor” and she later dropped it........"
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