A Firing Offense (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Last week in this space, I opined about what seemed to me to be Sherwin-Williams’ overly harsh decision to fire a college student working part time in an Ohio store for violations of company policy related to his wildly popular TikTok paint-mixing videos. Young employees often need counseling and guidance as they learn to navigate the workforce, but Sherwin-Williams threw a talented baby out with the bathwater.

Elsewhere in that issue was Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s report about a Fayetteville cardiologist who can’t seem to get fired no matter what he does.

Oh, Dr. Soliman Mohamed Ali Soliman was suspended for a week last year after a nurse at Washington Regional Medical Center accused him of sexual harassment. But that sanction by CEO J. Larry Shackelford was hardly the punishment that had been promised the first time Soliman was disciplined for “unwelcome or inappropriate” conduct toward a female co-worker at WRMC.

In 2015, the previous CEO, William Bradley, had warned Soliman that another complaint would result in his termination. Even that was not merely a second chance. Bradley knew by then that Soliman had been the subject of a no-contact order after allegedly stalking a female employee at the Illinois hospital where he worked before coming to WRMC in 2012.

So, what happened to him at Memorial Medical Center in Springfield when he was the subject of a court order that kept him from seeing patients when his alleged victim was on duty? Well, you can be assured that he wasn’t fired.

“No formal action was taken against Dr. Soliman’s privileges at MMC and his voluntary agreement to refrain from practicing is not a matter that was reportable to the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation or the National Practitioner Data Bank,” the president of the medical staff wrote.

In documenting the 2015 incident, Bradley indicated that WRMC had not been aware of the stalking complaint when Soliman was hired. Keeping such a pertinent fact from a new employer was another thing that Soliman was not fired for.

Now the WRMC nurse has sued Soliman for sexual harassment and WRMC for failing to warn her and other nurses of Soliman’s “long history of sexual harassment.” She told the Arkansas State Medical Board that she knows of three more victims at WRMC, although Soliman said he doesn’t know who they would be.

What action did the Medical Board take? Well, obviously, it didn’t prevent Soliman from practicing medicine. Instead, the overwhelmingly male board asked (but did not order) Soliman to continue voluntary monitoring by the Arkansas Medical Foundation, which treats physicians who have mental or emotional illnesses or engage in self-destructive behavior. And Soliman kindly agreed.

Yes, I understand that the market value of a cardiologist is vastly greater than that of a part-time paint store clerk. But the market risk of employing a man with a long pattern of sexual harassment and even stalking is vastly greater than the risk posed by a kid making a video of himself putting blueberries in a can of paint.

Soliman hasn’t exactly denied the allegations against him. Instead, his defense seems to be that his behavior has been unfairly mischaracterized. He didn’t stalk a co-worker for two years; he just had a “big issue” with a colleague that left him (not her) “traumatized.”

And the latest incident, the one that led to litigation against Soliman and WRMC, wasn’t 18 months of documented sexual harassment, including attempted kisses. Instead, as Soliman sees it, he had been “joking and trying to be nice to the people” and was surprised to learn — even after the earlier incidents, even years into the #MeToo era — that “actually a lot of people get offended by that.”

You don’t say.

I would note that “I was just joking” has become the go-to excuse for all manner of bad behavior. Last week, for instance, Joe diGenova, an attorney for President Trump’s failed re-election campaign, said in a radio interview that Christopher Krebs, who had been fired as the administration’s top cybersecurity official, “should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot.”

(Noted: Krebs was fired after he affirmed the security of the General Election. Because that’s a firing offense in the Trump administration.)

When diGenova drew criticism for suggesting violence against someone whose mistake seems to have been contradicting misinformation from the White House, diGenova did what Soliman did: He claimed he was just joking.

Hilarious.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.