IT WAS A JOKE!

By JAMES L. GRAFF/MILWAUKEE

Having topped the Nielsens and the best-seller lists, Jerry Seinfeld has now earned a place in the casebooks of employment law. Last week a Milwaukee, Wis. jury awarded $26.6 million to a man who got fired for recounting a slyly bawdy episode of television's most popular sitcom to a female co-worker. The high-dollar verdict in favor of former Miller Brewing Co. manager Jerold Mackenzie, 54, suggests that "the pendulum is beginning to swing back" on sexual harassment, says Steven Berlin, a partner at the employment-law firm of Littler Mendelson, based in San Francisco. "Juries are starting to feel as though the enforcement of these laws has become overly aggressive."

One morning in March 1993, Mackenzie asked co-worker Patricia Best if she had seen the previous night's Seinfeld, in which Jerry forgets the name of a woman he is dating but knows it rhymes with a female body part; he finally remembers it as Dolores. When Best didn't "get it," Mackenzie claims, he showed her a photocopy from the dictionary with the definition of clitoris. Best reported the incident to her boss. The brewery fired Mackenzie for "unacceptable managerial performance." The defendants' lawyers argued that the incident echoed an earlier harassment charge, but they were outlawyered by MacKenzie's ebullient advocate, Gerald Boyle. Juror Clint Baer, 20, says none of the jurors, 10 of whom were women, were offended by the Seinfeld story. They agreed to an award that, as Baer says, "sends the message that sexual harassment has to be more important" than what happened to Best.

--By James L. Graff/Milwaukee. With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York