Guys are always like, “Why are women always complaining about being sexually harassed, I’d love to be sexually harassed by my female boss.” Would ya? Would ya really? In a reverse of the typical sexual harassment in the workplace by a male supervisor against a female worker, James P. Gist found himself on the receiving end of unwanted advances. The 51-year-old former deputy constable filed a sexual harassment case against his former boss, Precinct 7 Constable Pam Matranga. Gist alleged that Matranga sexually harassed him from May 2011 until October 2011 with a variety of suggestive comments as well as an unwanted motorboat situation.
Gist told of a time when his 55-year-old boss was grabbing her breasts and saying, “Here, hold these.” She then allegedly walked up behind him and “pulled her shirt over my head and held me kind of in a headlock with her shirt.” Meanwhile Matranga claimed in a deposition:
“If anybody was in a bad mood, like if Phil was in a bad mood, I would say, ‘Phil,’ or to anyone, ‘Do you need to go under the shirt?.”
Two former employees also testified that Matranga put other employees “under the shirt,” used profanity often and constantly verbally flaunted about her body parts. What a confident older lady. The former Galveston County Constable who held the position since 2005 said that she found Gist’s found behavior to be “creepy” and never asked him to “go under the shirt.”
Gist also claims that Matranga performed lap dances in his office chair. During testimony Matranga admitted that she joked with Gist about his attending “chunky chick night” at a strip club where Matranga would perform for her deputy constable, but she did not recall doing sexy lap dances at the office.
Matranga was eventually dropped from the lawsuit, leaving only the county responsible for the damages. The case was finally resolved on Friday and a Galveston County jury awarded Gist $567,000, $200,000 more than he asked, for his suffering from his sexual harassment. Meanwhile Matranga continues to deny the accusations and called the verdict unfair and said that her former employee filed the lawsuit because she had refused to promote him. I’m behind on a few bills, so for half a million dollars this lady could motorboat me til I was blue in the face.
Via HoustonChronicle