In Bailey v. Sheehan, 2019 WL 3975453 (NDNY August 22, 2019), the court denied defendant’s motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s sex-based hostile work environment claim.
From the decision:
There remain a number of relevant factual disputes in this case as to what conduct Defendant actually engaged in, including whether Defendant yelled at Plaintiff and treated her differently from male employees (particularly in meetings with the Executive Team), whether Defendant propositioned Plaintiff for sex, whether he made comments suggesting she let out her “dominatrix side” at work, whether he made comments about her car indicating that a flashier car would help her have more sex, whether he made comments pertaining to getting erections as a result of her conduct, and whether he told sexually explicit jokes and stories in the workplace. There are also factual disputes as to what extent Plaintiff herself engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Given that these facts comprise most of the acts that Plaintiff alleges contributed to the hostile, sexualized work environment, the Court cannot find as a matter of law that there was not a sufficiently severe and pervasive pattern of conduct to establish the existence of a hostile work environment.