Sexual favors for workplace promotion is not a new phenomenon but has been around for some time; and although extortion of public personalities has been a problem of the past, one wonders if there is not more to this case of Letterman than meets the eye.

As he himself claimed, making public may embarrass the women, but on the other hand, if pressure to have sex was the problem in those cases, making public the case may help to prevent the underlying problem. It depends upon whether the sex was consensual casual sex or workplace sex for promotion.

The extortion is an inadvertent problem that has been overlaid upon the underlying accusation and the status of supervisors and sexual seduction in most gender harassment problems at work that form sexual harassment lawsuits.

While many applaude Letterman’s management of the extortion problem, the impulse to dismiss the facts may pose more of a problem for Letterman and for America than is currently visible, depending upon the circumstances of the sexual relationships with staff, as well as others with whom he didn’t have sex (in the event they had to forgo a promotion for one who did).