by Kirstin Downey Grimsley

About the author: Kirstin Downey Grimsley is a staff writer for the Washington Post.

Social worker Hank McGovern loves David Letterman and his flippant late- night talk-show style. One day at work in March 1995, he found himself trying to emulate what he thought was the host’s offbeat conversational manner with a new female co-worker at the Cleveland Center counseling facility in Shelby, N.C.

“I’m gonna flirt with ya,” he told the woman one afternoon. About a week later, he repeated the same thing. She told him she didn’t like it. Then accounts differ. She alleges that he said it a third time; he says he told her he wouldn’t say it again.

One month later McGovern, 42, was fired. According to...