Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Claims Against TikTok Survive Dismissal

In Puris v. TikTok Inc., 24cv944 (DLC), 2025 WL 343905 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 30, 2025), the court, inter alia, denied defendants’ motion to dismiss plaintiff’s hostile work environment (sexual harassment) claims asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the New York City Human Rights Law.

Plaintiff’s sexual harassment allegation arose from an event in June 2022. As summarized by the court:

In June 2022, Puris attended a creative industry event in Cannes, France, along with more than 100 other ByteDance employees. On June 21, she went to a dinner sponsored by Zenith Worldwide (“Zenith”), an advertising agency and major vendor to TikTok. The dinner was attended by various TikTok and Zenith executives, including Christian Lee, Zenith’s Managing Director. Lee, who Puris had not met before, became visibly intoxicated during the dinner. He forced Puris to sit next to him by physically blocking her path to her initial place at the dinner table. He then touched her arm repeatedly, asked her where to party after the dinner, and asked her where they could go dancing. Puris was eventually able to leave when another TikTok employee intervened to remove her from the restaurant.

Turning to its assessment of plaintiff’s Title VII claim, the court explained:

Puris claims that she experienced a course of discriminatory conduct that included various criticism and scrutiny in 2021 and early 2022, mishandling of her sexual harassment complaint in June 2022, and her firing in September 2022. She alleges that this conduct amounted to an “hostile work environment” in violation of Title VII. The defendants’ only basis for moving to dismiss this claim is that any conduct that could support it is too old to survive the applicable statute of limitations, under which conduct prior to July 27, 2022 is time-barred. Puris responds that the statute of limitations does not begin to run until the last act of the defendants that allegedly furthered the hostile work environment, which was after July 27, 2022. Puris is correct; her hostile work environment claim arises from allegedly linked conduct that occurred both before and during the limitations period and thus is timely. The defendants’ motion to dismiss Puris’s Title VII hostile work environment claim is denied.

The court reached a similar conclusion as to plaintiff’s claims under state and city law, under which plaintiff has a “lower burden” in that she need not allege “either materially adverse employment actions or severe and pervasive conduct.”

Thus, held the court, plaintiff “cleared the low bar to allege that she was treated ‘less well’ because of her gender” by claiming that “defendants engaged in a course of conduct including unfair criticism and exclusion from decisionmaking, which did not apply to male coworkers” supported “by alleging that there were few women executives at ByteDance, and that other employees expressed concerns to her about gender-based mistreatment.”

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