Read sometime in 2011-12.

n  “Harassment is about power - the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.” n



Most of the classic book experiences had been ruined for me because I had seen some Bollywood movie which was a copy or inspired from a similar plot or a story from a best selling novel and that too without giving the credit to the author. The movie I had seen almost 7 years back before reading this novel was Aitraaz. (Yes, there is a Hollywood movie as well.) While the topic chosen by Crichton was unique (as compared to his most of Sci-fi books), I knew where the novel is heading.

I liked the book but the time at which I had read it was different.

Jar of Death Pick #35

Disclosure is a 1993 novel written by Michael Crichton who is best known for writing Jurassic Park one of my all time favorite movies(I haven't read the book...yet) about sexual harassment in the tech industry.

Tom Sanders is an up and coming executive at a Seattle computer firm who expects to be made Vice President of his division but is shocked when his ex girlfriend Meredith Johnson gets the job instead. Despite being disappointed and a little angry he accepts it and agrees to an after hours meeting with her. Things quickly spin out of control and Meredith forces herself on Tom, he fights her off and leaves but the next morning he learns that Meredith has accused him of trying to rape her. Threatened with being fired a rightfully pissed off Tom decides to get a lawyer and fight the accusation.

I wanted to read this book because the premise seemed problematic and because I knew it was made into a movie in 1994. This book surprised me. I liked a lot and I didn't think I would. I've been in a reading slump for about 3 weeks and haven't been able to read anything but non fiction. Disclosure is the first fiction book I've been able to read and I just flew threw this.

Is the story problematic?

Not really once you read it, its a slick take on a still very topical issue.

Will I watch the movie?

Yes! I watched the trailer on YouTube and it looks like it sticks pretty close to the book.
I will say one thing about the movie, movie starred Demi Moore & Michael Douglas but as I read I pictured Heather Locklear(Melrose Place) & David Duchovny(The X Files). But I'm sure Moore and Douglas killed it.

Despite being nearly 30 years old I think the issues Disclosure brought up are still very relevant. Men do get sexually harassed. Men do get raped. And sometimes women are the perpetrators. Its extremely hard if you're a woman to come forward if you've been abused but I don't think enough is said about male sex assault victims. In this book Tom is ridiculed by both men and women when he says that Meredith assaulted him. People flat out say that a man can't be raped by a woman.Now one would think that most people know this isn't true but I think that a lot of people believe this.

I liked Disclosure a lot but it was written in 1993 so some of the language is cringy and the tech talk is super out of date(An entire paragraph is spent explaining what the internet is) but you can skim the tech talk and not miss anything.

Recommended to 90's nighttime soap opera lovers.

My Rating - 3.5/5
This was a nice entertaining read on an otherwise boring 36 hrs train journey. Based on a true story of sexual harassment in corporate world, it was a superbly paced gripping thriller with frequent plot twists. The virtual data library (sci-fi) part was bit of a distraction from the main plot. Enjoyed the enigmatic dialogues of Max Dorfman(the old man in wheelchair).
Though felt there were a few plot holes with some unanswered questions.

To be honest, this is the second time I started reading this book. To tell the story, the author had to include details about CD-ROMs that a non geek doesn’t want to read. However, I am glad I gave this book a second shot!

The basis for the story is sexual harassment in the workplace, but “flipped” by the author for our reading pleasure so it’s a man being harassed by his female superior. Make no mistakes about it, the harasser is as bold and brash as they come. A real corporate ladder climber

Very interesting perspectives on sexual harassment in the workplace. Crichton really goes in depth to show both sides of a story and how it can go down. Great ending.

I'm always in awe of Michael Crichton. His works are just so diverse. Dinosaurs, gorillas, spaceships, diseases, and this time female-on-male sexual harassment and computers. I liked this book much more than the movie version I saw many years ago. I always liked the story, but Demi Moore rubs me the wrong way (and that was even pre-Ashton Kutcher). Both the role reversal sexual harassment and the IT/virtual reality aspects are very much still relevant 15 years after the book being published. I was surprised at how good this book was after seeing the movie.

OMG what a thriller! Love, love, love the fast paced scramble! Sanders is a tech guy about to be promoted to be the new boss when he finds out his long ago ex will be taking his place instead. She invites him to her office when pretty much everyone has left work to discuss IT stuff behind closed doors. Does Sanders get sexually assaulted or was it mutual, or was there a gray place where those things get blurred?

Love Crichton’s description of MC’s state if mind


A brilliant thriller

I love this book. I love the thriller. The haunting game between the boss and her employee on sexual harassment case. I was young adult then when i read this book. And this book spoke to me about respect and greed. I also like the movie.

Chrichton is always compelling reading

Disclosure, based on the novel by Michael Crichton


“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.” - Alan Bennett, The History Boys

In the age of MeToo, after all the Disclosures of harassment of women, sexual abuse by powerful men like Harvey Weinstein – who has opened the infamous, nefarious series- who is facing retribution and Donald Trump that seems to somehow benefit from his boasting of grabbing pussies, Disclosure seems like some work from the Middle Ages, although it was only released in 1994.

This was an year when Michael Douglas – the fabulous star of Wall Street, for which he won one of his two Academy Awards, Wonder Boys and other motion pictures, some centered on sexual shenanigans such as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – and his costar Demi Moore – excellent in yet another film with an erotic theme, Indecent Proposal – where riding high.
Michael Douglas plays the role of Tom Sanders, such an unusual, outré character that it is hard – maybe impossible – to find some other personage with a similar standing in an artwork.

It seems impossible for a man to avoid making Indecent Proposals to a spectacular woman in motion pictures, novels, never mind repeatedly refusing her, standing up and fighting to remain pure, innocent and faithful.
Real life has brought over time – especially recently, in the last year – stories of women that have suffered vicissitudes, torment, pain, abuse, harassment, violations, restrictions, discrimination and more from men.

In History Boys , a masterpiece by Alan Bennett, there is a phenomenal quote that sums up history seen from the perspective of a woman history teacher, whereas the books on the subject have been written by men, who have mostly lead in history and foreseeable future in countries like Saudi Arabia and so many others…

“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

Counterintuitively, in Disclosure it is the man who is abused by…a woman.
It happens so seldom that it looks like an oxymoron.

We could even try to think of the odds, perhaps this is one in a million shot…probably even more…one in one hundred million, in the circumstances depicted in this feature, with people like Tom Sanders and Meredith Johnson.
Notwithstanding the preposterous proposition, the filmmakers are aware of the strangeness of their plot line, for they have it in the dialogues…

When the hero, victim of abuse from a…woman, talks with Philip Blackburn, the latter is outraged by incidents reported by Meredith who accuses the victim of trying to molest and rape her.
When the protagonist shows the scratch marks on his chest as proof of the assault he has suffered, he is told that surely that happened while the evidently less powerful woman was trying to defend herself…

“Weak? She is fit as a fiddle…she can knock both of us to the ground in a few seconds” this is not a quote, but he said something similar

In conclusion, it seems strange to look at the adventures of the poor victim that suffers from sexual abuse, if that casualty is a man.
Although, in Fatal Attraction the improbability is taken to another extreme as the character played by Glenn Close comes close to killing the handsome hero portrayed by the eternal Michael Douglas…

A page-turner that turns gendered assumptions about corporate sexual harassment upside-down.

I don't think I read this book during my younger-self's Crichton wave in the 1990s. If I did (possibly I did?), it would have been unpalatable to younger-me for its corporate setting, the sexual politics, and the premise not anchored in science fiction. But now-me enjoyed this breezy thriller. It's definitely Crichton, but you can feel him pivoting from the earlier science-fiction thrillers that might be considered classic Crichton to the next wave of books that are more techno-business/sex/power/politics/commentary novels. The Afterword suggests the story is based on a real situation with names, roles, and the dynamic altered, though it's unclear whether that's to be taken as a real-world comment or one within the world of the novel.

The story follows Tom Sanders, a competent middle manager at a tech company before the rise of the Internet (the novel was published in 1994). The Seattle-based company is on the verge of being acquired by an East Coast firm that specializes in educational offerings, including textbooks. The company is diversified in CD-Rom players, cellular phones, and has ventured into VR-accessible databases. Tom and the office are looking forward to the merger because the plan is the company will go public after a year and they will all get rich off their stock options after the IPO. But there's a problem on a Malaysian assembly line of the next-generation drives, within Tom's division, and uncertainty as a new boss with a background in sales and marketing, Meredith Johnson, is anointed the new division chief instead of Tom. Tom and Meredith used to be in a relationship over a decade ago, but he's married with two children now and is not interested in Meredith, despite her sexual beauty and allure.



<--- spoilers below --->



The team is not certain how or why she's been given the executive role, and at the end of a dramatic and hectic Monday workday, Meredith basically tries to rape Tom in her office. He is aroused and partially receptive to Meredith, so the scene is complex, but tries to pull away and rejects her before penetration. He tries to leave, she throws stuff at him, and threatens him. She also repeatedly gaslights him at work and then files a claim that he sexually assaulted her. This leads Tom to the precipice of his life--everything is threatened: his job, his marriage, his work relationships, and above all in this particular novel, the prospect of the vested stock options that he and his team have been working toward at their company for years.

He finds a badass lawyer in Louise Fernandez and the pair go down a rapid-pace rabbit hole to fight the full power of Tom's firm by threatening to file a Title VII sexual harassment suit against Meredith in federal court. With the merger hanging in the balance, the power dynamic ebbs and flows between the parties in a hectic and dramatic week as the reader and Tom learn more about the complicated web of sex, power, and business process within which Meredith's latest actions are embedded.

This is a very fast-paced story with short choppy chapters mostly hewing to Tom's perspective but flowing to a few other characters when needed. The book is not necessarily a polemic, but you do have the sense of how inverting the gender roles shows the difficult territory faced by women who suffer sexual harassment. At the same time, reading this book now, you definitely feel a different vibe about gender power dynamics, even though everything seems to presage where things feel now, for better and worse. There's also the thought experiment about norms and regulations that may not support equality or equity plus a nuanced approach to what the law does and does not do. One of the characters at one point says the point of the law is not justice but dispute resolution. It's an interesting contention and one that is sort of meta-central to the book overall: we have a sense of justice and what's right, but Crichton keeps pushing and pulling at the security of that assumption to check us against the extremes explored in this story, and then suggests that perhaps they are not extremes after all.

I enjoyed this book. I also enjoyed getting sucked into reading it. I finished over 300 pages in one sitting and went to sleep about three in the morning. I needed that kind of physiological relaxation after a stressful work day, so I am glad for the (re)discovery of this novel.

It seems they did a movie featuring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. I feel I don't need to see this movie. The book is vivid in my imagination and I don't think seeing those stars would add to my sense. For one thing, Michael Douglas might be miscast as Tom is not quite as dashing as Michael Douglas. And I could see Demi Moore playing Meredith well, but she's so vicious and cunning and still human in the book that I'm not sure I would want to see a performer in the role. Plus, the tech from 1994 is bound to feel dated from the vantage point of 2022, although it's interesting how prescient Crichton was about the way virtual reality (not VR specifically but the value of image over substance) has permeated all aspects of our society, politics, economics, and culture.

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