THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 7, 1994 TAG: 9409070470
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
The Pentagon report on the Tailhook Association's 1991 convention has been barred from evidence in a lawsuit brought by a former Navy officer who was one of the women sexually abused there.
The ruling, issued last Friday by Judge Philip M. Pro of U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, who called the report ``not sufficiently trustworthy,'' was a victory for the Tailhook Association, an organization of naval aviators, and its co-defendant, the Las Vegas Hilton, where the convention took place.
Pro's decision is the latest development in a suit whose defendants have counterattacked by questioning the credibility and the character of the plaintiff, Paula Coughlin.
It is also the latest turn in a 3-year-old scandal that has badly tarnished the Navy's reputation, forced a Navy secretary to resign but resulted in not a single court-martial for wrongdoing.
The events at the convention led to a series of Navy and Pentagon investigations that ultimately concluded that 83 women had been assaulted or at least harassed there.
One of the 83 was Coughlin, who was then a Navy helicopter pilot. She resigned from the service May 31 because of what she described as unrelenting pressure resulting from her complaint that she had been groped by drunken male aviators in a crowded third-floor corridor one night during the four-day convention.
Her suit, scheduled for trial on Monday, seeks an unspecified sum in damages for what it portrays as failure by the hotel and the Tailhook Association to provide proper security.
Pro's ruling, which was first reported Tuesday by The Washington Times, granted the defendants' pretrial motion to have a two-volume report by the Defense Department's inspector general tossed out as unreliable.
The report, based on interviews with more than 2,900 people and issued in April 1993, described in vivid detail misconduct ranging from consensual oral sex to drunken assaults that had occurred during a full weekend of boozy partying.
But Pro wrote, ``The report is replete with double hearsay and summaries of testimony attributed to various unidentified individuals who were not subject to cross-examination.''
KEYWORDS: TAILHOOK U.S. NAVY SEXUAL HARASSMENT
ASSAULT REPORT by CNB