In Cali v. Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, 22-CV-942S, 2024 WL 3877393 (W.D.N.Y. August 20, 2024), the court, inter alia, denied defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s hostile work environment sexual harassment claim asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From the decision:
Isolated incidents of harassment ordinarily do not amount to a hostile work environment. But if extraordinarily severe, a singular, isolated instance of workplace abuse may support a hostile-work-environment claim. … While the single incident need not involve an actual or threatened physical assault, it must be severe enough to work a transformation of the plaintiff’s workplace.
DHS maintains that the Second Circuit has repeatedly rejected efforts to base hostile work environment claims … on incidents involving attempted or actual kissing. Although it may have rejected such efforts in individual cases, it has not rejected such claims categorically. Instead, the Second Circuit has deliberately avoided enunciating regimented standards to ensure adequate flexibility in effectuating Title VII’s broad remedial purpose. Cali’s claim is thus not categorically precluded simply because it involves an attempted or actual kiss.
The allegations here concern Cali’s claim that Della Villa assaulted her in the station parking lot on the night of August 18, 2020. Upon arriving in the parking lot where Cali was engaged in conversation with another agent, Della Villa made statements to the agent that prompted him to leave. Now alone with Cali, Della Villa invaded her personal space and became “touchy feely” with her, suggesting groping or other inappropriate sexual physical contact. Della Villa then “grabbed” both sides of Cali’s face and attempted to kiss her, as the two remained alone in the parking lot. Cali “put her head down,” as Della Villa gripped it, in an effort to avoid Della Villa’s physical advances, and she told him that she did not want him to kiss her. Id. The event was traumatic enough to cause Cali to subsequently be nervous and physically ill in Della Villa’s presence, as well as fearful that she may encounter him or other male agents in the female locker room at the station. It also required that she seek mental-health treatment for assault.
[Citations, internal quotation marks, and bracketing omitted.]
The court rejected defendant’s reliance on case law in which courts “rejected as insufficiently severe to support the objective component of a single-incident hostile-work-environment claim,” finding those cases “factually dissimilar.”