Sexual harassment lawsuits—vigilance, frequent training and remedial action remain necessary.
In a recent case1, the plaintiff was a housekeeper at a hotel operated by defendant management company. A male co-worker made two sexual overtures to plaintiff, once offering to pay for sex, and four weeks later, again seeking sexual favors. When plaintiff reported the first incident to her supervisor, the latter stated the offender had made sexual comments to other female employees at the hotel causing “multiple” workers to quit.
Nonetheless, defendant failed to take any action to curb the co-worker’s conduct. Plaintiff next endured threats to her safety by members of the offending co-worker’s family. As a result of these various circumstances, plaintiff resigned and sued for hostile environment sexual harassment.
To constitute sexual harassment, the unwanted conduct must be “sufficiently severe or pervasive.” When determining whether conduct rises to this standard, courts assess the frequency of the conduct, its severity, whether it is physically threatening or humiliating and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.
Defendant argued that plaintiff’s case boils down to only two incidents of “merely offensive utterances.” While there is no magic number of harassing instances needed to qualify as frequent, the court described defendant’s conduct as direct propositions for intercourse and other sexual activity which could be threatening or humiliating to plaintiff.
The court denied the hotel’s motion to dismiss the charge of sexual harassment due to the continuing pattern of sexually harassing conduct by the co-worker, and management’s failure to curb it.
As a result of this ruling, the case will either proceed to trial or be settled by agreement of the parties.
The lessons are clear: Prompt, decisive action is required whenever management learns that an employee is engaging in unwanted, sexually charged conduct. Training on a regular basis should be mandated. Some states require at least annually, but more frequent training may be indicated. Your no tolerance policy should be baked into the training.
1 Rover v. Commonwealth Hotels, Inc., 2026 WL 881192 (S.D. Ala, 2026).