In Pankonin v. Southeast Community College Area, 4:24-CV-3229, 2025 WL 1898086 (D.Neb. July 9, 2025), the court, inter alia, held that plaintiff sufficiently alleged a hostile work environment sexual harassment claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The court summarized the facts, and explained its application of the law to said facts, as follows:
The plaintiff began planning a school-sponsored trip to France with a coworker. The coworker “repeatedly brought up sexual topics,” “talked about her marriage and extramarital relationships, including an extramarital relationship” with another faculty member, and “propositioned” the plaintiff.
The coworker and her alleged affair partner “escalated” the sexual harassment in February 2023, making comments about a “threesome” and referring to the plaintiff as “Hot Amber.” Filing 1 at 4. The coworker tried to hold the plaintiff’s hand; forcefully hugged her and touched her breast; referred to herself as “rapey;” gave the plaintiff jewelry for Valentine’s day; and continued giving unsolicited information about the coworker’s sexual relationships.
…
Anti-discrimination laws do not prohibit all verbal or physical harassment and do not create a “general civility code.” At the pleading stage, the Court must determine whether the alleged harassment is “severe or pervasive enough to create an objectively hostile or abusive work environment.” District courts must “filter out” complaints based on isolated incidents and “the ordinary tribulations of the workplace, such as the sporadic use of abusive language, gender-related jokes, and occasional teasing.”
The Court must consider the totality of the circumstances, including the frequency of the discriminatory conduct, its severity, whether it is physically threatening or humiliating or merely an offensive utterance, and whether the conduct unreasonably interfered with the employee’s work performance.
The harassment alleged from December to February 2023 was frequent, and the allegations include unwanted physical groping; more than an “offensive utterance.” Even without “tangible effects” like diminished job performance or psychological harm, severe and pervasive discriminatory conduct “offends Title VII’s broad rule of workplace equality.” The plaintiff alleged that her employer knew of the harassment and failed to take action. See Lopez, 989 F.3d at 662. After the plaintiff reported the misconduct, she was still required to work with the coworkers who harassed her, a “significant factor” in the totality-of-circumstances inquiry, Hathaway v. Runyon, 132 F.3d 1214, 1223 (8th Cir. 1997).
The college’s argument that the plaintiff’s allegations are not sufficiently severe primarily rest on decades-old, out-of-circuit decisions made on summary judgment records. See filing 7 at 25. Based on the frequency of the conduct over the course of only a few months, and the severity of the conduct, including unwanted physical touching and explicit sexual propositioning, the Court is satisfied that the plaintiff has pled more than “sporadic, isolated incidents” and has sufficiently alleged a “poisoned” work environment that affected a term or condition of her employment.
The plaintiff also references two isolated “reprimands,” in March and November 2022, and alleges she was treated worse than her male colleagues for engaging in similar behavior. This conduct, at least at the pleading stage, supports an inference that the college’s supervisors were hostile towards the plaintiff on the basis of her sex. These earlier acts also support the inference that the plaintiff’s employer intentionally and knowingly ignored her complaints of harassment as part of a pattern of ignoring the plaintiff’s complaints of disparate treatment.
The defendant argues that, while the plaintiff alleged she reported the misconduct, she did not allege that the misconduct continued after those reports. It’s true the complaint is silent about any specific incidents of harassment after April 6, 2023. Rather, after April, the focus of the plaintiff’s complaint is how her supervisors failed to respond to the harassment that, for the most part, occurred in February. But those allegations are part of the fourth element of her hostile work environment claim: that the plaintiff’s employer knew of the harassment and failed to take remedial action. In this case, the plaintiff pled that her supervisors did more than passively fail to act—they actively obscured her complaints and made it more difficult for her to seek redress.
(Cleaned up.)
Based on this, the court held that plaintiff has sufficiently pled a claim under Title VII that she was subject to a hostile work environment on the basis of sex.