Joy Behar has spoken out about the horrific sexual harassment she faced while working as a teacher on Long Island and detailed a shocking moment with her boss that left her “disgusted.”
The 81-year-old comedian, who recently joked on The View that she wants to sleep with a woman when she is 90, used to teach English at Lindenhurst Senior High School on Long Island from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and it was here that she suffered a series of sexual harassment incidents.
Writing about the incident, Joy referenced the #MeToo movement, but said: “In 1969, we didn’t have hashtags. If your boss was harassing you, you had to be creative.”
The first-person article, which was published on Air mail In February, it begins with an incident that occurred in the classroom when a department head came to observe one of Joy’s lessons and afterwards told her: “You were so good I could have fucked you on the blackboard.”
Joy, who was 27 at the time, spoke about how she felt: “I was torn. On the one hand, I felt repulsed. On the other, I was a single, self-sufficient woman with no trust fund, and the head of the English department liked my lesson. My mind went into overdrive.
Joy Behar has opened up about the time a senior colleague left her feeling ‘disgusted’ after touching her inappropriately.
The 81-year-old, pictured here in March, wrote about her experience in an article published in Air Mail.
“I thought about reporting him, but I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere. The principal was only interested in catching students smoking marijuana in the bathrooms. And I really needed this job, so I decided to try and take it as a compliment.”
Joy recalled how a colleague of hers named Krystie was also being sexually harassed by another teacher, who kept commenting on “how big her breasts were.”
The two women, along with another teacher from Germany named Bridget, began discussing ways in which they could get revenge on the two men for their inappropriate behavior.
Things came to a head when the head of the department proposed to Joy after coming to “observe” another of her lessons and suggested they go out for a drink together after work.
Joy lied and told him she was ‘involved with someone’, but said this spurred him on further, and when she tried to excuse herself and leave the room, the man in question put his hands on her and said: ‘Look at the boner you made me get’, referring to his erection.
That same day, Krystie experienced something similar when another teacher walked into her classroom and lifted up her shirt, leaving her “hyperventilating.”
Joy described Bridget’s reaction, saying the history teacher “sprang into action” as she led her into the man’s classroom.
“Bridget walked over to him, pulled out a tape measure and said, ‘Excuse me, can I measure your penis?'” Joy wrote, before revealing how her hands were tied behind her back and her pants pulled down.
Joy, pictured in 1992, used to work as an English teacher at a school on Long Island, where she was sexually harassed by a colleague.
“You better not tell anyone about this, or your penis won’t be so lucky next time,” Joy recalled Bridget telling him before untying him and leaving the classroom.
And when it came time to deal with her own situation, Joy decided to invite the department head to another one of her classes and this time she turned the tables on him through her lesson.
During a grammar lesson, Joy decided to use the analogy of the “grammatically correct way to get a bully to leave you alone” and asked her what she would do in that situation.
When her students began suggesting that a harasser in a “higher position” should be reported to his superiors, or perhaps the police, Joy recalled that the man “got up and started walking slowly toward the exit,” while she sarcastically suggested that he should “come back next week.”
DailyMail.com has contacted the school for comment.
According to Air Mail, the story was taken from the first chapter of Joy’s upcoming memoir, to be published by Regalo Press.
The upcoming non-fiction book was first announced in November 2023 and will see Joy share stories on a variety of topics including family members, hair, erections, stalkers, and romance.
While the memoir isn’t scheduled to be published until late 2024 or early 2025, Joy fans can expect the TV personality to “take aim at everyone and everything, including herself.”