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Wed Mar 9 03:48:19 PST 2005

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 Harassment Claims Roil Habitat for Humanity

 By Alan Cooperman

  AMERICUS, Ga.  --  Since Habitat for Humanity fired its founder and president, Millard Fuller, for sexual harassment six weeks ago, his supporters throughout the giant nonprofit housing organization have campaigned to reinstate him.

 Calling the accusation unsubstantiated and the punishment excessive, Fuller's allies have created a Web site and an online petition signed by more than 3,600 donors and volunteers who work in many of Habitat for Humanity's 2,300 independent affiliates around the world. They have conducted weekly prayer vigils in Americus, organized symbolic work stoppages at Habitat construction sites and urged major contributors to withhold gifts.

 Yesterday, Habitat's international board of directors unanimously reaffirmed Fuller's dismissal at the beginning of a three-day meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. Despite that vote, supporters said they will continue to push for Fuller's rehiring.

 But the outpouring of sympathy for Fuller, 70, has also had a reverse effect. After years of silence, several former employees and close associates of Fuller  --  including three ordained ministers  --  have come forward to say they have inside knowledge of numerous prior allegations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment by him, beginning before he founded Habitat for Humanity here in 1976.

 The seven-member executive committee of Habitat for Humanity's board of directors removed Fuller as president on Jan. 31 after an accusation that he inappropriately touched and made suggestive comments to a female employee during a ride to the Atlanta airport in 2003. The committee also fired his wife, Linda Fuller, who had helped him run the organization for 29 years.

 The question posed by Fuller's defenders is how an organization that describes itself as a Christian ministry could dishonor a man who gave away a personal fortune and built a movement to help low-income families buy decent homes.

 The question posed by his accusers is how an organization devoted to the dignity of all people could, for many years, hush up allegations that its leader was demeaning women on his staff.

 The controversy threatens not only to sully the reputation of one of the nation's most prominent charities but also to embroil its most famous volunteer, former president Jimmy Carter, who lives nine miles west of here in Plains, Ga.

 Carter declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the allegations. But according to the Fullers and Habitat board members, the former president tried twice in the past year to broker an agreement to keep the latest accusation quiet and allow Fuller to retire honorably with his $79,000 annual salary for life.

 Carter also rose to Fuller's defense on the only previous occasion when sexual harassment charges against him became public. In 1990-91, five women who were current or former employees of Habitat told the board of directors that he had subjected them to unwanted sexual advances  --  including kissing them on the mouth and touching their buttocks  --  as well as vindictive behavior when he was rebuffed.

 Board members said they came close to firing Fuller. But they said that after Carter warned in a confidential letter that a "national scandal" could ensue, the directors allowed Fuller to work for a year from an outside office and then restored his duties as chief executive.

 In the March 26, 1990, letter, Carter said he himself was given to physical displays of affection and appreciation, such as kisses on the cheek and hugs, to women he knew professionally and socially that were sometimes not welcomed. He wrote that he shook hands with several men and hugged and kissed several women at the dedication of the John F. Kennedy Library in 1979 and that the late president's widow had "visibly flinched" at his actions.

 "Without minimizing in any way the significance of what has happened at Habitat, let me say quite frankly that I have had some similar kinds of relationships with some of my own female employees and associates. If one ever complained officially, there could be an avalanche of similar charges," Carter wrote in the letter, which Millard Fuller provided to The Washington Post.

 John Wieland, a Georgia developer who has built 26 houses for Habitat for Humanity and donated more than $500,000 to the organization, was on the board in 1990-91. "Our conclusion was that Millard was a hugger and was misinterpreted, and some people went out of their way to make something big out of something that wasn't really that big," he said.
 Clashes Over Expansion 
 In a four-hour interview at his home here, with his wife at his side, Fuller said he believes that the recent sexual harassment charge is false and was merely the pretext for his firing. He said that the real reason was tension with the 31-member board over his drive to expand Habitat's operations.

 "There are 190 countries in the world. We're in 100, and I want to go into the other 90," he said. "The board doesn't want to expand. They want to retrench."

 If the board does not rehire him, Fuller said, he will create an organization to raise money for Habitat projects, circumventing the international headquarters and dealing directly with local affiliates.

 Board Chairman Rey Ramsey, a Washington lawyer, acknowledged that Habitat's directors had clashed with Fuller over budgets and expansion plans. But he said those disagreements were healthy. The firing, he said, resulted from recurring allegations of sexual harassment, as well as from efforts by both of the Fullers to disparage alleged victims, intimidate staff members and pressure the board into ignoring the charges. The Fullers denied disparaging or intimidating anyone and said the board was angry with them for trying to defend themselves.

 Millard Fuller "has left a great legacy for Habitat, but he is not a victim of anything. He is the product of his own deeds," Ramsey said.
 Once a Millionaire 
 Fuller has told of his founding of Habitat for Humanity in several books, and it is legendary throughout the organization, which has grown from having a handful of volunteers in 1976 to an organization with a $200 million annual budget and 550 workers at the Americus headquarters.

 While in law school at the University of Alabama in 1957, Fuller and a classmate began a direct-mail business, selling cookbooks and candy to high school chapters of the Future Homemakers of America, which resold them at a profit. By the mid-1960s he was a millionaire with two homes, a Lincoln Continental, and thousands of acres of pasture for his cattle and riding horses.

 When the Fullers' marriage began to falter, however, they sold their share in the business, gave away their fortune and moved to a Christian communal farm in Americus called Koinonia, the Greek word for fellowship. It was there that the idea of helping the poor to build homes with sweat equity and no-interest loans was born.

 Two of Koinonia's former leaders say there is another side that has never been told. Al Zook, now a massage therapist in Denver, and Christopher Bugbee, now a communications consultant in Los Angeles, said Fuller engaged in two extramarital affairs at the farm. Bugbee also said a female volunteer accused Fuller of unwanted sexual advances.

 "The discovery that his private conduct was at such odds with his public preaching . . . destroyed the trust between Millard and the rest of the Koinonia leadership and led to the mutual recognition . . . that the community and the Fullers must separate," Bugbee said.

 Asked whether that account was true, Fuller said he had made "mistakes" at Koinonia but denied that they had anything to do with the founding of Habitat for Humanity. "I left Koinonia because I was unhappy with the leadership structure and was just restless," he said.

 Zook said the farm's leaders quietly brought in Christian counselors from Reba Place Fellowship, a Mennonite group that specializes in reconciliation, to help Fuller. Two decades later, Habitat for Humanity also called on Reba Place for discreet counseling when the five women made their allegations in 1990-91, according to the Rev. David Rowe, who was then Habitat's director of operations.

 Rowe, who is now minister of Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield, Conn., said that for a time, Linda Fuller was furious at her husband. "I was present at counseling sessions where she confronted Millard on what he had done and what that did to her," he said. "But then sometime after that . . . she just decided that her fate, her future, her family just required her not only to stand by her man but to back and fight for Millard. And I never understood at the time, nor now, what it was that changed that."

 Linda Fuller, who worked for years alongside her husband with little pay and no job title, said she always considered the 1990-91 accusations to be overblown. In the end, Habitat gave some of the women generous compensation packages when they resigned. None sued, and none has spoken out publicly with her name attached, until now.

 "What people know who worked with Millard for a long time was that this behavior was very prevalent. Five of us were willing to come forward and confront it," said Susan Rhema, 46, who was a Habitat volunteer in Africa and Peru before serving as the organization's director of training from 1986 to 1991.
 More Allegations 
 The Rev. Julie Peeples and the Rev. Paul Davis, a married couple who were Habitat for Humanity's staff chaplains at the time, said the allegations came to light in their routine exit interviews with women who were leaving the organization. Five women went to the board and "easily four or five others shared their stories" but did not want to confront Fuller, Peeples said.

 Millard Fuller "was somebody I had held on a pedestal for years and years, and I didn't want to believe it. But these were women who weren't out for anything," said Peeples, now pastor of the Congregational United Church of Christ in Greensboro, N.C.

 In the interview at his home, Fuller described the 1990-91 allegations as a cultural misunderstanding.

 "In the southern culture that I was raised up in and Jimmy Carter was raised up in, very warm affection to women was shown by men. So when they said I had done something wrong, I was astounded because I was doing nothing more than what I'd been doing all my life," he said. "But when they said it was offensive to them, I said, 'I'm sorry, please forgive me. It won't happen again.' " While Fuller said his actions 15 years ago were misinterpreted, he called the latest allegation "completely false."

 The accuser, Victoria Cross, is a former Habitat for Humanity employee whose husband is serving as a military chaplain in Iraq, according to members of the board. Her attorney, Steven Carrigan of Houston, said that she was negotiating a settlement with Habitat and that she would not discuss the details of the allegation.

 According to a report by a law firm hired by the board to investigate Cross's allegation, she drove Fuller from Americus to the Atlanta airport on Feb. 21, 2003. During that 2 1/2-hour ride, he allegedly talked about the Bible and sexuality.

 "Millard began to speak in a soft tone about how, in the Old Testament, baby girls develop into little girls who are sweet and innocent, and it would be appropriate for them to sit on his lap, but in the New Testament, those little girls would have gone through God's Plan and met the fulfillment of a little girl growing into beautiful full grown women," the report said.

 Fuller allegedly asked Cross several times if it would be appropriate for her, "as a full grown beautiful woman," to sit on his lap. While she was driving, he began rubbing her right arm, then stroked her cheek and chin, told her she had soft skin and ran his fingertips "down the line of her mid-chest to the point of her mid-sternum," at which point she jerked away, the report said.

 In the interview at his home, Fuller said he never touched Cross. After she dropped him off at the airport curb, he said, she parked her car and then returned to have lunch with him in the terminal.

 "Common sense tells you that if I had done something improper to that woman, she wouldn't have looked me up to have lunch with me," he said.

 Many of Fuller's supporters also say the facts are on his side.

 Dale Young, a longtime Habitat volunteer in Bedford Hills, N.Y., said she has been with Fuller "in dozens of situations, with dozens and dozens of women" and has never seen any inappropriate behavior.

 "Millard is an honest man," she said. "If he had done something wrong, he would own up to it."

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