PORTLAND, Maine — A Casco woman is suing a Portland vacation company for sexual harassment and discrimination, saying her supervisors made the workplace hostile through lewd comments and inappropriate texts.
The defendant is Festiva Development Group LLC, a privately owned company that operated a sales office in Portland and sells partial “ownerships” of its network of vacation resorts, similar to timeshares.
In its response to the complaint in court, the company flatly denied nearly all of the woman’s allegations and argued she misconstrued nonsexual comments as sexual ones.
For instance, Festiva acknowledged that a sales manager often called a certain employee “double D” or “Jenny D,” but the company “denies that this was a sexual comment,” according to the response filed by attorney Katharine Rand of the Portland law firm Pierce Atwood.
The plaintiff, Tatsiana Crawford, originally sued Festiva in Cumberland County Superior Court last month, but the case was moved to U.S. District Court this week.
Crawford, who is represented in the case by Old Orchard Beach attorney Guy Loranger, worked for Festiva from June 6, 2012, until Dec. 21, 2013, when she resigned because “she could no longer work in the hostile work environment,” her complaint states.
Leading up to that resignation, Crawford alleged that a supervisor complained he helped her make money, but “got nothing in return,” asked her if she was “naughty,” talked about the size of his penis, and sent her text messages with images of men and women with just leaves covering their private parts.
After a screw on a broken chair ripped Crawford’s skirt and cut her on another occasion, the same supervisor asked to “see your wound,” the plaintiff’s complaint alleges.
Crawford also claimed in her lawsuit that another supervisor told her in front of several co-workers that he “would play with you and have lots of fun.”
She also alleged a third supervisor — an executive with the company — refused to give her a higher visibility position with Festiva while she was pregnant, but then offered her the job after she had her baby.
Crawford pressed forward with her legal complaint against the company after receiving a “right to sue” letter from the Maine Human Rights Commission.
In her response to the lawsuit, Rand, representing Festiva, flatly denied nearly all of the allegations made in the complaint.
The company argued in its response that Crawford’s lawsuit is untimely, and suggested that she should have complained about what she considered inappropriate behavior within the framework of Festiva’s human resources department before turning to the outside legal system.
“Reasonable care was taken to prevent or correct any allegedly discriminatory conduct and plaintiff unreasonably failed to take advantage of corrective opportunities provided or to otherwise avoid harm,” Rand wrote in the company’s response.
With the sexual harassment complaint, Festiva finds itself embroiled in two Maine lawsuits. The office of Attorney General Janet Mills sued the company in late 2013 for what Mills described as pressuring “Maine consumers into buying an expensive but basically worthless product using misleading tactics.”
The Festiva attorney defending the company against the unfair business practices case argued at the time that the company complied with all laws regulating its sales processes and that it has thousands of satisfied customers.
That case is currently in the discovery phase, in which both parties conduct research and take testimony from possible witnesses.