From Our Files: The Bank Teller Case

We publish statistics because they show the scale of what happens to California workers. They do not show what a single case looks like from the inside. This is one of ours. The client agreed to let us tell it with the details that would identify her removed. No names, no bank, no city, no dates.

What the bank got wrong

The bank's first move was the one we see most often. It treated the assault as a private matter between two people that happened to work together, took the one step that made it look responsible, removing the manager, and considered the matter closed. Its lawyers were prepared to argue that the gathering was unofficial, the location was off site, the hour was after work, and so the company owed nothing.

Under California law that argument has two problems. The Fair Employment and Housing Act makes an employer strictly liable for harassment by a supervisor, and courts routinely treat gatherings that grow out of work, organized by a manager, attended because of work relationships, as connected to employment. A branch manager who uses his position to bring a subordinate to a place where he assaults her is not off duty in any sense that matters to the statute. But the bank's bigger mistake came later, and it was one the bank made entirely on its own.

Six months later

After the manager was gone, the client stayed. She was a good employee and she needed the job. Over the following months her hours were reduced. Then she was terminated. Nobody at the bank connected those decisions to the assault in writing, and nobody needed to. The sequence did that: a report of a sexual assault by a supervisor, and within six months the person who reported it was out of a job while the bank that had said it was not responsible moved on.

That sequence is a retaliation claim. It does not depend on proving the bank was liable for the assault itself. It depends on showing that the client engaged in protected activity, reporting sexual harassment in its most severe form, and that the bank took adverse action against her afterward. California law asks whether the report was a contributing factor. The timing, the absence of any documented performance problem, and the bank's own eagerness to distance itself from what happened all pointed the same way.

The first offer

At an early mediation, before discovery, the bank offered a sum that was meant to close the file quietly. It was not nothing. It was also not close to what the case was worth, and it was priced as if the only claim were a disputed harassment claim with a scope of employment defense attached. We declined it.

The case we filed put retaliation at the center: a woman raped by her manager, who reported it, and who was pushed out of her job for having been raped, with severe emotional distress as a result. Framed that way, the scope of employment defense was beside the point. The bank could not argue that firing her was outside the scope of its employment.

The result

The bank settled for a substantial confidential amount, many times the early offer. The client did not have to testify at trial. The terms are private, and California law would in any event allow her to speak about the facts of what happened to her if she chose to, because settlement agreements in this state cannot silence a worker about harassment or discrimination.

What this case teaches

• Off site and after hours do not end an employer's responsibility when the event grew out of work and the harasser was a supervisor.
• What the employer does after a report is often the strongest claim in the case. Watch hours, schedules, write ups and terminations in the months after a complaint.
• Report in writing. The retaliation claim depends on proof that the employer knew.
• An early offer at mediation is priced on the employer's theory of the case, not yours.
• Emotional distress damages in California are uncapped, and a jury hearing this sequence would have been asked to award them.

The statistics pages this story connects to: sexual assault at work, workplace retaliation, wrongful termination and what happens after you report.

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