New England Biz Law Update
With retaliation charges increasingly being tacked onto workplace discrimination and sexual harassment claims, employers can learn from the example of a Massachusetts-based mechanical contractor that saved itself from litigating a false claim and fired a dishonest employee all at once.
In addition, the company has not confronted a discrimination claim or false claim since.
Bret A. Cohen of Mintz Levin in Boston explained that his client consulted him when a female employee alleged her supervisor groped her on the job. Cohen recommended that a third party immediately investigate the claim.
“The investigator first meets with the woman and gets the whole story, pins her down on all the details, and the investigator calls me up and says there’s something fishy about this woman’s story,” he recalled.
When the investigator contacted the supervisor, he refused to answer questions until he spoke to his own attorney. The next morning he met with the investigator and confessed to having had, on multiple occasions, consensual oral sex with the female employee.
“The investigator had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. She’d never before in 15 years of doing this had the accused admit to way more than he was accused of,” Cohen said.
He asked the investigator to interview the supervisor about the most intimate details of the accuser – things the supervisor would know only if this had been an ongoing, mutually agreeable situation. “The reason being, if he knows this, then she’s lying,” Cohen said.
The investigator met with the female employee making the allegation and asked whether she had ever shared personal, intimate details about her body or sex life.
“What’s she going to say, other than no?” Cohen said.
When the employee said she had not, the investigator caught her in the lie.
After more interviews the investigator discovered that the female employee had seen her own name on a list of people who were to be laid off following the completion of a particular project. She filed the harassment claim in an effort to save her job. When the investigator confronted the accuser with this theory, she came clean and admitted she’d lied. The company then fired her.
This was four years ago – and the employer has not had a single claim of discrimination since because it sent a message that all claims will be taken seriously, investigated, and that there will be consequences if employees have been dishonest, he said.
