Kelly v Leonardo Employment Tribunal Thread 4

[ickky]

The Tribunal has now finished and we await the judgement.

Abbreviations:

C or MK - Claimant, Maria Kelly
NC - Naomi Cunningham, barrister for C
KW - Katy Wedderburn, solicitor for C
R or L - Respondent. Leonardo UK
ST - Susanne Tanner KC, barrister for R
J - Judge
P - Panel member
GC - gender critical
GI - gender identity
AL - Andrew R Letton VP People Shared Services Leonardo - respondent witness

Tribunal Tweets coverage here

https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/kelly-vs-leonardo-uk-ltd

Thread 1 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5416903-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-29th-september-10am?page=1

Thread 2 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5420656-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-thread-2

Thread 3
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5421183-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-thread-3

Ah yes, the dreaded gushing sensation, and the high speed waddle to the loo. How I do not miss that. I also ended up in hospital with anaemia, and had to have multiple blood transfusions over several days. Luckily the clot the size of the palm of my hand that escaped landed on the bathroom floor at home rather than in the office loos, but the clean up of that was bad enough, I don't want to think about dealing with it in a cubicle situation. Even if you are able to wipe your bloody hands on loo roll, there's still going to be some residue left that stains the tap water pink when you go to wash your hands.

Can an appeal judge make any recommendation for a lower court judge who makes a political ruling in clear defiance of the law? In terms of discipline? Dismissal? Retraining?

Judge must have a trans niece. It’s the only explanation.

What this judgement demonstrates is that belief will very often trump reason, reality and humanity, even in the most intellectually able people, who are often capable of using their abilities to convincingly justify their beliefs.
The surprising thing about it is that the reasoning shown here is of such poor quality and evidently motivated by contempt.

In theory the SC should have stopped this happening in the first place, so no I don't believe if it's shredded it would curb it.

Why would a judge ignore a EAT if they choose to ignore a SC ruling?!

If she needs some gardening done for her appeal I’m in!! Absolutely the wrong decision. Maya lost first time round.

It is like this judge has deliberately made it nonsensical so that the appeal would be pursued and an overturn binding.

Exactly. The simple arithmetic is correct, but the applied maths and logic is a disaster.

To work through your 'Rapist Bob' example, let's imagine a company of 99 women plus rapist Bob, and with Leonardo's bizarre 2-person-single-occupancy loos.

If men commit 98% of sexual assults, then at first look you'd expect 2 offences (rounding up) by women for each one by 1 by Rapist Bob.

But what's the pattern of offending? Women who commit sexual offences don't generally attack other adult women - so the chances of a workplace assault by a woman are much, much lower than that headline 2%.

If you're in the 2-person loo with 1 other person, and that person is a woman, the probability is that it's one of the 'safe' women. And if it's not, you have a much higher chance of fighting her off than you have of fighting off a man. So the fear is considerably lower, as well as the actual.risk.

And if we go back to Leonardo rather than Rapist Bob's company, the big error of logic is that the comparison of numbers is wrong. If you let any men into the women's loos you let all men into the women's loos - 80% of employees, not 0.5%.

It's such a confusing judgement - the judge comes across as either incredibly obtuse, or a TRA, neither of which I would expect a judge to be.

That coming from a woman judge means to me that the judge has been incredibly lucky and is one of those women who have never experienced a flooding during her period.

I had a female doctor years ago who seemed to think women were making shit up because she, as she always insisted on telling me when I was telling her about flooding and heavy periods that went on for weeks, that hers didn't hurt and only lasted a few days.

Any appeal needs to focus on legal consistency rather than the ins and outs of flooding and sexual trauma, I'd say. Keep it logical and consistent rather than emotive. The judge obviously got too involved with the heat of the issue.

I’ve generally found male GPs more helpful and sympathetic with these issues. One female GP was particularly curt and dismissive. One male GP told me that he took menopause symptoms seriously as he had a close family member (I assumed his mother) who had had a particularly difficult time with it.

That's a great reference. Thanks! I should have known to take a look at what Michael Foran had to say but I'm not on Twitter and am shamefully not a paid subscriber to his substack.

Forgive my ignorance, but is there a panel on such Tribunals, or is it just the judge making the decision?

I get the impression from what she has previously out out in the press about her lifestyle and charity work in "fashionable North Berwick" that she is a posh twat with luxury belief systems, and the workforce just needs to be slapped down for the greater good.

After reading Foran’s analysis, it sounds like an appeal could very well be in the offing if the claimant can bear going through all that again. But it is such an important precedent to set!

The judge hasn’t deliberately set out a crap argument to leave an appeal case extremely likely to be granted, has she? (I am not always tinfoil-hatted, I swear!)

Careful, the story that the tin foil hat protects you from the mind control rays is government disinformation - it actually acts as an antenna amplifying their effect 😉

female jurors in particular are less likely to believe victims.

I think female judges and jurors in these cases should be made to armwrestle an average-sized man before they're sworn in.

I think Carol Potter is an illustrative case. The weight of her professional responsibility was no less than that a of tribunal judge - responsible of regulatory compliance; the lives of thousands of patients a year; of maintaining high standards of care; maintenance and modernization of practices, equipment, and administrative systems; top line budget allocations - a nexus of stakeholders to be accountable to from boards, to government oversight committees to regulatory agencies. And yet, she apparently felt her paramount duty above-and-beyond all that was trans rights advocacy. If that were the orientation of someone at such a high level in the NHS, why wouldn't we expect that same level of personal commitment, professional standards be damned, of judges?

Some of us have trans nieces but still believe in women's rights to single sex spaces.

Sorry - just to be clear that wasn't Foran's analysis but he did comment that he agreed with it and shared it too.
He said he was hoping to get a personal comment over the coming weeks.

The judge is assuming too many things.
I would love to know where she got the statistics on toilets because no one else has them. In my UK database 100% of sexual assaults in toilets are by men.

The point was made in 2003 when the Sexual Offences Act clause was put in about sex in toilets being illegal that no two women had ever been prosecuted for having sex in toilets (Thank you Chris Bryant for that research). As far as I know that still stands. Toilets are a specifically vulnerable place, hence the clause.

Women just don’t think about toilets and elimination in the way men do. There’s the territorial marking/ getting away with it in a public place/ sexual voyeurism/ opportunistic stuff men do that has no bearing on whether a man has been ‘vetted’ or not.

Again, it’s not all men. But it is always men.

I would love to know where she got the statistics on toilets because no one else has them. In my UK database 100% of sexual assaults in toilets are by men.

This could now be because sexual crimes committed by men identifying as trans women are recorded as women's crimes.

As for the judges statement that we can't easily identify which sex someone is, apart from babies bundled up in nappies, that is laughable.

I've just finished reading the judgement.

Wowzers!

I'm gobsmacked at how appalling it is.

I'm baffled as to why the Judgement was rushed out and published in this shoddy state.

The Judge must have known when drafting it, that this will be the defining case of her career. It would be very widely read, analysed, quoted from, and almost certainly appealed.

And it is still appalling poorly written.

Do Judges not have access to proof-readers, or any form of quality control? If I were a lecturer in law I'd want to use this as an example of bad legal drafting. To set it for the class's homework, and task all students to identify three obvious errors. And provide alternative drafting to improve the quality of its arguments, better demonstrate judicial impartiality and enhance its readability.

Who benefits from publishing it now, rather than delaying until the New Year, and attempting to edit it into something a little less career and reputation destroying?

It must be hugely embarrassing for a Judge to have a case overturned at appeal. Basically it means a group of your senior colleagues have marked your work and given it an F. You didn't understand the law, didn't apply it correctly and failed to deliver justice. Yet here we are.