How to remove Character Style in Word 2003

How to remove Character Style in Word 2003

I am copying text into a Word document that has its styles protected. Some of the text has a Character style applied to it that I would like to remove. I can change the style and it looks okay visually, but when you click inside the text itself you can see in the style menu that the Character style is still applied. I try to change the style using the style drop down but the Character style won't go away even if I change it to the Paragraph style.