How to Win Harassment Cases When the Defense Says Nothing Sexual Happened

“Nobody touched her.”
“No sexual comments were made.”
“There was nothing overtly sexual.”

When the defence says this, many lawyers panic slightly. They start worrying about labels. About definitions. About whether the jury will expect explicit conduct.

That concern is misplaced.

Because harassment cases are rarely won on sexuality. They are won on power, intrusion, and persistence.

And jurors understand that instinctively.

The Defense Is Arguing the Wrong Question

When the defence says nothing sexual happened, they want the jury focused on what was said or done.

That is not the question jurors are actually answering.

Jurors want to know whether the conduct crossed a line. Whether it invaded someone’s space. Whether it altered the conditions of the workplace. Whether it would have stopped if boundaries had been respected.

Sexual content is not the centre of that inquiry. Control is.

Your job in closing is to shift the frame from “Was it sexual?” to “Was it acceptable?”

Once that shift happens, the defence argument starts working against itself.

Harassment Is About Context, Not Explicitness

Defence lawyers love to isolate moments.

A single comment.
A single text.
A single interaction.

Viewed alone, each moment may sound harmless. Even banal.

But harassment cases are never about single moments. They are about accumulation.

When you place the conduct in context, jurors begin to see what the defence hopes they won’t. Frequency. Escalation. Persistence after discomfort is expressed.

A text message asking about someone’s personal life may be neutral once. When it appears nightly. After hours. After resistance. After requests to stop. It becomes something else entirely.

Jurors do not need sexual language to recognise intrusion. They recognise it in their own lives.

Power Does the Work Sexuality Cannot

One of the biggest mistakes lawyers make is trying to prove intent.

Jurors do not need intent. They need imbalance.

A supervisor does not need to say something sexual for conduct to feel coercive. Authority alone changes the meaning of behaviour. A request feels different when it comes from someone who controls schedules, evaluations, promotions, or access.

This is where many defence arguments quietly collapse.

When the defence insists nothing sexual happened, jurors often hear something else entirely. They hear an admission that the conduct is being judged only on surface words, not on who said them and under what circumstances.

Power supplies the meaning the defence claims is missing.

Repetition Turns Innocent Acts Into Harassment

Jurors understand a simple truth. People who mean no harm stop when asked.

This is why repetition is so dangerous for the defence.

When conduct continues after discomfort, after avoidance, after boundaries are expressed, it stops being accidental. It becomes deliberate. Even if the words never change.

In closing, this is where timelines matter again. When jurors see the same behaviour repeating over weeks or months, the defence’s insistence that nothing sexual occurred starts to feel irrelevant.

The question becomes why it did not stop.

Workplace Impact Beats Labels Every Time

Jurors are not asked to classify conduct. They are asked to decide whether it altered the work environment.

Did it make someone dread coming to work.
Did it change how they interacted with colleagues.
Did it force them to manage someone else’s behaviour instead of doing their job.

Those are tangible harms. Jurors understand them immediately.

This is why experienced trial lawyers spend more time in closing talking about impact than terminology. When jurors see how conduct affected daily work life, the absence of sexual language stops mattering.

The harm feels real because it was.

The Closing Argument Shift That Wins These Cases

In closing, the most effective approach is not to fight the defence’s premise. It is to accept it and move past it.

“Yes, the defence says nothing sexual happened.”
“And that’s exactly the point.”

Then you show the jury why harassment does not require explicit sexual conduct. You show them how persistence, power, and intrusion did the damage.

At that point, the defence is arguing a definition while you are arguing reality.

Reality wins.

Where Trial Lawyers Sharpen This Skill

This reframing is not intuitive early in practice. It comes from seeing how jurors actually react in the room, not how cases are described in appellate opinions.

This is the kind of strategic thinking we focus on inside Evidence at Trial. The goal isn’t to relearn harassment law. It’s to understand how evidence functions when jurors are deciding credibility, power dynamics, and workplace norms in real time.

Many experienced litigators find that once they stop chasing explicit conduct and start structuring closings around context and impact, these cases become clearer and harder to defend.

If you’re interested in that kind of trial-focused analysis, you can learn more about the Evidence at Trial membership here:
https://www.evidenceattrial.com/membership

When the defence says nothing sexual happened, they think they have narrowed the case.

In reality, they have opened the door.

Harassment is not defined by explicit language or physical contact. It is defined by conduct that invades, persists, and alters the workplace. Jurors know this because they have lived it.

Your closing argument should not try to make the case sound worse.
It should make it make sense.

And once it does, the defence’s favourite line loses its power.