According to one of the claimants’ court filings, Dean Huffman, the former manager from Ohio, recalled that Joe Beck, a regional vice president, and Mark Light, the chief executive, “were entertained rather than offended when a manager at a company meeting described a good female store manager as one who ‘walked like a sailor’ because of the amount of sex in which she had engaged and had swollen lips because of her frequency of having oral sex.” The claimants included other statements in their filings that reported that “Mr. Light was also observed by multiple witnesses at company meetings being entertained by female managers, in various states of undress, in a swimming pool and joining them in the pool himself.” Moreover, Light and two regional vice presidents “have had sex with women employees and conditioned women’s success at Sterling upon acceding to such demands, an expectation attributed to other male executives as well.” (Light, like other executives, did not respond to my inquiries.)
At one meeting, a district manager got wind that Heather Ballou, of the V-necks and borrowable ears, wanted to move back home to Florida from Louisiana. Now, transferring was hard, she told me. You couldn’t just ask for it. And there was no place in the company intranet where promotions or job openings were listed. At a managers’ meeting, she remembered a district manager saying to her: “I could make that happen for you. Let’s go have some fun and solidify the deal.” He told her if they had sex that night, he’d make sure the transfer happened. So they did it, and to his credit, Heather’s gentleman suitor honored his commitment. He continued to harass her “lightly,” she told me — just some texts asking her to meet him halfway between Florida and Louisiana for another magical night. (“You up for a little stress release?” she told me the texts said.) She had a baby later, with another man, and things were quiet for a while. Then he started up with renewed lightness. (“Do you want to try for number 2?”)
Not everything was a test, though. Not everything was harassment or even coercion. Here is the story of one of several rapes I heard about during my interviews: Danielle, in upstate New York, was at her first managers’ meeting in 2004. (She did not opt into the lawsuit.) She said a fellow manager, Rick Docekal, kept trying to talk to her. Everywhere she went, it seemed as if Rick were there, just leering at her. (Many calls and emails and texts and Facebook messages and LinkedIn InMails to Rick were not returned.) Rick, who was in his 40s, kept bringing drinks to her friends. One night, he stayed close to one of Danielle’s friends, later going to her room and repeatedly asking if he could just come to bed to spoon with her. She refused but redirected him to Danielle’s room.
According to court filings, Danielle and her roommate, Wendy, were asleep when Danielle heard a knock. She says she opened the door to find Rick, who kept saying he couldn’t find his room, could he just come in? Danielle said no, but after his repeated badgering, she let him in. “I said these four things,” she told me. “I have never forgotten these four things: Do not take your clothes off; do not touch me; stay on your side of the bed; and stay on top of the covers.” He agreed, and she fell asleep. When she woke up, her panties were down around her ankles, and he was raping her. (Rick later said that she had brushed his ankle with her foot, which he took as an invitation, and that she initiated further foreplay.)
Danielle asked him to leave and woke up her roommate, Wendy. She called her district manager, Kelly Contreras, who came to her room in the middle of the night and accompanied Danielle to the hospital. Danielle says that Kelly told her that before they left for the hospital, Tryna Kochanek asked Kelly if she was sure Danielle wasn’t lying, and to remember that Kelly’s loyalty needed to be to the company. (Kelly was not permitted to confirm or deny this to me because she is a claimant in the arbitration; Tryna Kochanek did not respond to my inquiries.)
Later, after a trial, Rick was found guilty of sexual battery (his case was later reversed, and he was given a new trial and pleaded no contest; he was sentenced to probation). According to statements in Wendy’s complaint and available through public Ohio court documents, a few months after the meeting, Wendy was informed by Michael Lynch, the vice president of employee relations at Sterling, that Danielle had retained counsel and was considering filing a civil suit against the company for having created an unsafe work space. Wendy had been an employee with excellent performance records, so much so that she had won a reward trip to Puerto Rico. But according to legal filings, Lynch and another executive, Bob Farrell, along with Steve Zashin, an employment lawyer who represented Sterling, summoned her to their corporate headquarters in Akron and began to interrogate her about her past romantic relationships, how well she knew Danielle, whether she’d been engaged in “dirty dancing” (their 1980s phrase, not mine) the night before the rape, whether or not Danielle had had sex with another man at the meeting, what Danielle had been wearing during the meeting, whether or not Wendy had had breast implants. She told them she would tell them about the night of the rape, but that other questions were off-limits — that she had a right to privacy. According to the filings, they told her that she was on Sterling property and therefore had no expectation of privacy. She began to cry and told them that she had been raped at 15 and that she would no longer speak with them without a lawyer. She tried to leave, and one of them said, “Sit down.” When she refused to answer questions unrelated to the night of the rape, they let her leave. She was fired the next week for “failure to cooperate with an internal investigation.”
I don’t know much about what happened next. Sterling compelled Wendy’s suit out of court and into Resolve, its very own hospice for personnel issues. Wendy’s lawyer, Paul Leonard, described to me that even among arbitrations, the Resolve program seemed brutal. He was disturbed by the lack of kindness toward his client, who had been traumatized by her adjacency to the rape, having herself been raped as a teenager. The process went on and on, he said, until finally, exhausted, Wendy took a settlement that was far smaller than he believes she could have and should have gotten. “They wear you down,” Leonard said. Wendy never spoke with me. Upon settlement, she had signed an N.D.A., and she could never talk about what happened at the company ever again.
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