MOSCOW — An American attorney in the Moscow office of a high-power international legal firm may sue her former bosses for sexual harassment after she was let go from her job in the wake of publishing an erotic novel.Deidre Dare, 43, was dismissed from a $213,000-a-year job with Allen & Overy for what her supervisors called “gross misconduct.” Dare claims company bigwigs became “hostile” after she complained about sexual harassment following an incident in which a male higher-up kissed her at a party.
The kiss occurred after Dare began posting a serialized erotic novel on her website. The law firm immediately insisted she stop publishing the material, she told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. She complied, but she did not remove the original chapters. Instead, she posted a notice stating “The author has been forbidden from publishing further chapters of Expat for the time being. She will resume if and when she is permitted to.”
“The whole office knew about my book, but they took action against me about it only after I had complained of sexual harassment,” Dare told the Telegraph. “It seems to me like a witch hunt.”
The novel, Expat: A Weekly Serialized Novel About Living in Moscow, is told from the perspective of a female character who refers to herself as “part drug addict, part alcoholic.” At least four characters in the purported work of fiction bear the same first names as Dare’s former coworkers. The first chapter goes into graphic detail about an affair the narrator had with a married man.
“I was fired by email,” she told the Telegraph on Monday. “I had the impression that the company thought this was a true account. It’s not true.”
Dare’s website also includes images of her in lingerie and her original erotic poetry.
Dare joined the Moscow bureau of the law firm in 2008 as an international finance attorney. She said she may sue the firm in the U.S. courts, especially if she cannot renew her visa.
“It’s unbelievable that all this has happened from a little Web page novel, which I initially wrote just as a discipline for me to write,” she told the Telegraph. “Moscow is a wonderful place to write about and Russia is so fascinating, and it is true that lots of strange things happen here. But it’s important to say that it is not a blog, but more of an adventure story.
“There is casual sex, drinking, and in Moscow I did all those things, but who cares? [Allen & Overy’s] claim is that I bought the firm into disrepute and they are very upset. I just don’t think I did.”
Dare said Russian readers enjoyed the novel, and she hopes for a book deal to arise from the incident. She also has been asked to write a column called “Sexpat” for a Russian paper.
“Russia is my home now and I’m not leaving without a fight,” she told the Telegraph.
