By Emily Peck

This is Bull

You often hear that men's lives are "ruined" when women complain about sexual harassment. It is a dubious claim at best; especially when made by powerful men. Many male executives get huge payouts after accusations surface. Meanwhile, others launch new ventures, write bestselling books (like Bill O'Reilly) or return to standup comedy.

The reality is, most of the time it's women's lives that are "ruined" when they speak up about mistreatment. As I've been covering sexual harassment for the past couple years, this has been one of the constants.

Women who tell their HR departments about harassment don't fare well. Maybe they're transferred to a new role at the company. Or they wind up fired for "performance" issues, and can't find work in their industry again. Or they file a lawsuit, and can't find work in their industry again.

Most of the time they wind up totally switching careers, earning less money and struggling to recover.

Ok, so what about when a woman treads delicately? She simply takes her abuser aside and asks him nicely -- we must always be nice -- to please stop.

She's doomed, too. Indeed, that's what happened to actress Eliza Dushku. She was bullied and harassed by Michael Weatherly, the leading man on the TV show they were working on (called "Bull.")

So she took him aside and tried to reason with him. The result? She was quickly written off the show. Miraculously, a lot of Weatherly's abuse had been filmed (they were on a TV set) and so she was able to go to CBS and complain and actually wrangled a $9.5 million settlement out of them.

This almost never happens, and it's worth reading all of Dushku's essay to understand what happened. But if you're not up for that, the title is pretty perfect: "I worked at CBS. I didn’t want to be sexually harassed. I was fired."