Bond Votes Against Measure To Help Victims Of Rape Who Work For Government Contractors

Tuesday, Kit Bond and 29 other Republican Senators voted against an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would prohibit the Defense Department from contracting with companies that prohibit employees from suing for rape or sexual harassment.

Before the amendment from Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) passed by a 68-30 margin, senators heard the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former Halliburton contractor.

ABC News:

Jamie Leigh Jones was a 20-year-old young woman working her fourth day on the job in Baghdad for contractor Halliburton/KBR in 2005, when she says she was drugged and gang-raped by seven U.S contractors and held captive by two KBR guards in a shipping container. But more than four years after the alleged crimes occurred, Jones is still waiting for her day in court because when she signed her employment contract, she lost her rights to a jury trial and, instead, was forced into having her claims decided through secret, binding arbitration...

"I didn't even know that I had signed such a clause, but even if I had known, I would never have guessed that it would prevent me from bringing my claims to court after being brutally sexually harassed and assaulted," Jones, who told her story to ABC News' Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross in an award-winning 20/20 story, testified at the Senate committee meeting on the issue. "I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant, or that I would eventually end up in this horrible situation."

You can read Ross' 2007 story here.