RIVERSIDE, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – A California pool company can’t escape a former employee’s sexual harassment lawsuit by claiming she had stopped reporting the conduct because nothing would have been done about it anyway.
The Fourth Appellate District didn’t agree with any of the appeals made by Blue Fountain Pools and Spas, which is accused by Daisy Arias of being a hostile work environment at which her butt was grabbed, she was called a “dumb bitch” and she was physically assaulted.
Owner Farhad Farhadian, according to the court ruling, handled a 2017 altercation by refusing to accommodate Arias’ request not to work with salesman Sean Lagrave and terminating her health insurance.
“The unlawful conduct certainly went on for a ridiculous amount of time, and Arias did agree she had the thought that complaining about a new act of unlawful conduct would ‘do no good,’” Justice Marsha Slough wrote.
“But her statement doesn’t have the definitive meaning petitioners try to impute to it. She appears to have meant not that she no longer believed her earlier supervisors were willing to intervene, but that Lagrave was such an inveterate abuser he would continue his misconduct anyway.”
Arias’ allegations include:
-Lagrave repeatedly asked her for dates, grabbed her buttocks and lauded his sexual prowess;
-Lagrave showed her pictures of him engaged in sex acts with other women and described his sex life in detail; and
-Lagrave called her a “dumb bitch” and shouted “F--- you bitch” during a fight in 2017 in which he also bumped her chest with his.
According to the ruling, this behavior went on for several years with management failing to address it. She called the police and left work after the physical altercation and never came back. A jury will have to decide if she was constructively fired or quit.
The defendants’ main strategy was to argue Arias missed the one-year statute of limitations. But the appeals court affirmed that there were incidents of sexual harassment in the one year preceding her lawsuit and that Arias has established a “continuing violation” that defeats the timeliness argument.
“(T)here is a factual dispute over whether and when Arias’ employer made clear no action would be taken and whether a reasonable employee would have concluded complaining more was futile,” Slough wrote.
“On this record, where Arias continued complaining about obviously harassing conduct and tried complaining to different people, we conclude that question must be resolved by a jury.”