Buddy Fletcher’s wife, Ellen Pao, is suing her venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, charging sexual harassment.

This from the NYT:

In the suit, filed May 10 in California Superior Court in San Francisco, the partner, Ellen Pao, contends that beginning in 2006 she was sexually harassed by Ajit Nazre, an investment partner who left the firm last year. When she complained to senior partners and others at the firm, the suit says, they retaliated against her, limiting her career advancement and income.

It is hard not to be skeptical of this given that Pao is married to a man who has made a dubious habit of suing (and being sued) on similar grounds.

The Times mentions this, albeit in a somewhat misleading way:

Ms. Pao, a graduate of Princeton University, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, is married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a prominent Wall Street investor who has filed discrimination suits in the past. In 1991, he sued his then-employer, Kidder, Peabody & Company, saying it was severely underpaying him because he was black. An arbitration panel awarded him $1.3 million in that suit. Last year he filed a racial discrimination suit against the Dakota, the well-known Manhattan apartment building, after its co-op board denied his request to buy an apartment next to his to accommodate Ms. Pao and their then-2-year-old daughter.

Why is this misleading? Well, first, Fletcher wanted to buy the apartment so that he could combine it with his current one and flip the new, larger unit, presumably because he needed cash; he wasn’t buying it for his wife and child, because they were living in San Francisco at the time with no plans to return to New York.

Second, and more important, while Fletcher did indeed win $1.3 million from an arbitration panel in the Kidder matter, that money was essentially back pay that had been disputed; the panel denied his allegations of racial discrimination, for which Fletcher wanted in the neighborhood of $30 million. The Times’ language suggests that the $1.3 million was in response to Fletcher’s claims.