Complaints about crotch-touching lawyer led to staffer's firing, suit says
A former operations manager for an Oregon law firm claims in a lawsuit that she was fired because of her complaints about a partner’s crotch touching.
Former employee Ashley Buxton seeks $250,000 in her suit against the law firm Shapiro & Sutherland, the Oregonian reports. The suit says Shapiro & Sutherland is known in common parlance as a foreclosure mill.
According to the suit (PDF), Buxton noticed the partner’s “inappropriate sexual behavior” soon after she began working at the firm in January 2014. The lawyer touched his crotch and genitals through his pants “habitually and obsessively in front of employees,” the suit says.
The behavior interfered with Buxton’s ability to do her job, the suit alleges. Buxton frequently had to travel with the lawyer, and the lawyer sometimes made remarks of a sexual nature, including a statement that Buxton did not need to worry because they would be staying in separate hotel rooms, the suit says.
Buxton first complained about the behavior to the law firm’s operations director when she was training as a new employee, but nothing changed, the suit says. In January 2015, she raised the issue in an email with another lawyer at the firm, according to the suit. She got no response and sent a follow-up email two days later that copied a human resources coordinator. She was fired two hours later.
The suit, filed on Monday in Multnomah County, claims Buxton was subjected to a hostile work environment and retaliation.
The law firm did not respond to the Oregonian’s request for comment.
