How you can lose your job over sexual harassment - an ooold story.

[la_belle_laide]

This is an old story, and some of you know it from the locked posts a few years ago.
So now, after a couple of years have gone by and I've gone back to school, graduated, and have a new (much better) job, I'm going to tell y'all how I got fired from the one I had for nine years. This post is unlocked.



TRIGGER WARNING for assault, abusive language, misogyny etc

From May 1999 to May 2008 I worked at an animal hospital. It wasn't the best of environments—in fact, quite often it was downright abusive—but the money was decent, I loved working with animals, and most of all, I had a great network of friends whom I did not want to leave. (We still stay in touch and hang out.)

Over those years, my boss had said some pretty nasty things to me, (such as once, comparing me to Chewbacca while the "pretty girls" who worked there were "Princess Leia.") Just things generally along those lines, like personal comments about my looks, my hair, the way I dressed and such. Now you're saying, "Why did you stay in such a sexist, abusive environment?" See above. I needed the job, I had friends there, and after a while, that kind hostility becomes, sadly, background radiation. It's always there, poisoning you, you just become unaware of it.

Once in a while we had a set of really, thoroughly repulsive clients, a married couple who do a job as clowns for kids' parties. They are extremely well known locally, and very rich. A little history: A few months before the incident I'm about to describe, my Mother had a run-in with someone who was advertising for the clowns. She'd seen this woman trying to advertise to a little Latino boy, who kind of brushed the advertising off. The woman snapped at him, "WHY DON'T YOU PEOPLE LEARN ENGLISH?" My mother commented that the boy spoke perfect English, and what was this woman's problem either way? Before it could escalate, the owner of the establishment stepped in and asked the clown-advertiser to leave.

Getting back to May 2008 – or actually April. These two clowns used to board their pet a lot. They were known among the workers for saying really appropriate and creepy things and being generally gross. They always left the restroom a mess, with toilet paper everywhere and urine on the seat.

This time, in late April, I was in the hospital kitchen, cleaning up. The guy-clown came out of the restroom and approached me, holding out his hand. He said, "I just want to thank you for a job well done." When I didn't take his hand, he took mine. His hand was WET, and he proceeded to run it all up my arm. I was freaking HORRIFIED and snatched my hand back to wash it. He hurried on out of there and ran into another, quite young girl in the hallway. (More on her later.)

My boss came around and I told him what happened. He looked into the bathroom and then told me, "Get your gloves on. You're going to have to clean this up."

The bathroom was disgusting. There was urine on the floor, ON THE WALLS, and a mass of toilet paper in the toilet. Once in a while, I stood up to my boss, and I did this time, too. I told him "absolutely not," and more importantly, I told him what the guy-clown had done, wiping his wet hand all over me.

My boss said, "Aww come on, they're clowns, that's what they do! They're just clowning!"

Later, the girl that guy-clown had run into in the hall came up to me. She was crying. She said that the guy-clown had grabbed her behind on his way out and said the same thing he said to me: "I just want to thank you for a job well done."

I urged her to tell our boss. We went together and did so. He said that it was gross and inappropriate, but that there was nothing he could do aside from sort of usher her out of their path the next time they came in.

She wouldn't go to the police, and she begged me not to either. She said that if her father found out some man had touched her, he would kill him. (NOTE TO PARENTS: I know you want to protect your kids, but when you say "If someone ever touches you, I'll kill them," they believe you, and sometimes it stops them from going to the cops. They don't want to see you go to jail. Personally, I left a lot of assault/battery unreported because I didn't want my Dad to get himself locked up.)

I couldn't get this incident out of my mind, and it was gnawing at me that our boss was so blithe about the whole thing. I ended up talking to some friends online about this. (MISTAKE.) This was a place that I assumed was fairly private—only a handful of regulars, mostly friends. (Did I mention, MISTAKE!) We AIM chatted most nights, told each other our secrets, etc. I mentioned who these people were, and everyone urged me to file a report anyway. I didn't, because the girl who got molested had begged me not to tell anyone that this had happened to her. (To this day, I have never revealed her name.)

That's when these messages started showing up: ("Kapunua" is the name I used, btw, that's me.)















So by now, I had realized that there was someone lurking on this web page who was going to start trouble. I quickly deleted all of my posts - as you can see, because she mentions that I had been quick to delete them when I saw we weren't alone.

This person's internet name is Mya. She lives down south, and that's all I know of her. And I only know that because she spent a lot of time after this, coming to my personal journal and leaving messages similar to this one, and after a while I tracked her ISP. She later signed in with her user name ("Mya Lyas" to be read, not-so-cleverly, "my alias,") to admit that she was the one who sent the emails. She is a devout Christian and said that she did it to "protect" the people who had done the molesting. She said she felt protective of them because I could offer her no proof that any of this had actually happened, and that I was in the wrong for coming forward.

The result was that my boss ended up firing me a few days later, over the phone. He called me up, explaining that the clowns were rich, and said they were going to sue him if I kept talking about the incident. He said it was "too much of a headache" for him to deal with and that he had to think about his own kids' future. I told him, "You know this is wrong," and he hung up on me."

Before you ask, I did go to a lawyer. Back then, my Dad was still living and he took me to one of the best ones he knew. The lawyer told me that, since no official police report had been filed, and since the girl wouldn't come forward, it was my word against theirs and there was nothing I could do. NY state law, he informed me, gives an employer the right to terminate any employee at any time for any reason, as long as the reason isn't a bias one. He said, "Basically, he could say, 'I don't like your hair today, so you're fired,' and you wouldn't have a case." I joked that, hey, he had actually made fun of my hair a few times.

Getting fired, though it made me madder'n hale, was the best thing that could have happened. I was enraged, yes, but at the same time, the first day that I was supposed to go to work, AND DIDN'T HAVE TO, I felt awesome. It was the best feeling ever.

As y'all know, I ended up going back to school for massage therapy. I work in an awesome space with really nice people. I have good clients who treat me well. My boss weeds creepy people out of the system. I have college loans, for sure, and they are pretty harsh. But I also make FOUR TIMES the salary so, on a good month, I almost break even.

Mya? Actually still follows me around the internet, spreading her "Christian" love my way with similar messages. Sometimes I find her here on my LJ, leaving rude comments. Sometimes on another forum I go to. I hope she's having a good time.

There are no names mentioned in this post, and pretty much no one knows where I used to work, who my boss was, who the crazy clowns are or anything. So I feel comfortable talking about this experience, because hey, it's what happened to me. This is how you can lose your job over sexual harassment, if YOU are the one being harassed. It's how you can lose your job for trying to put a stop to it, for making waves. I was a feminist before this, I'm glad to say. But now I'm like, super mega change-the-world feminist, and I have all of those people to thank for that.




That's the whole thing! Now ya know.