CONCORD — A former staffer with the State Employees Association won the first round of her gender bias and sexual harassment federal lawsuit that alleges SEA President Rich Gulla made “many sexually inappropriate jokes and references to every female person in the office.”
Rich Gulla
Maddisun Barrows, 27, of Rochester, went to work for Gulla from April 2013, first as a legal secretary and then later as an organizer and an internal organizer.
She was let go in June 2017 for issues SEA lawyers maintain were unrelated to her gender or sex harassment.
Barrows maintains Gulla’s conduct was so pervasive she can’t recall every instance and the lawsuit alleges a long pattern of inappropriate behavior that lawyers for the union have denied.
“These included comparing her sexual attractiveness to that of another female employee, indicating his desire to have sexual relations with her, using inappropriate sexual innuendo in the workplace, greeting female employees by making the sound of a dog barking, and ignoring concerns raised by Barrows and other female employees,” the lawsuit states.
In the lawsuit, Barrows’ lawyer maintains Gulla treated her as an object and had no respect for her.
“For the first six months, woof was just about the only thing that Gulla said to her,” the lawsuit stated.
In response, lawyers for the SEA and Gulla said the comment was meant in humor towards many workers and wasn’t sexual.
“He said woof to both men and women as a greeting several years ago,” the lawyers wrote in answering the lawsuit.
“He did not mean anything by it.”
The lawyers said the union president stopped using the expression in 2014 after learning some were offended by the comment.
“When it was brought to his attention that people felt uncomfortable, he immediately stopped using the expression,” lawyers for the SEA and Gulla responded in court documents.
Lawyers for the union and Gulla said Barrows was fired for insubordination and her refusal to accept a two-month suspension without pay to resolve a grievance she had filed.
In her lawsuit, Barrows seeks unspecified amounts of back pay, future compensation she lost through this dispute along with compensatory and punitive damages.
In November 2017, Barrows first brought a charge against the union to the New Hampshire Human Rights Commission.
After the commission issued her a “right-to-sue” letter, she lodged the federal lawsuit alleging state and federal laws regarding gender discrimination and sexual harassment were broken.
U.S. District Court Judge Landya McCafferty issued the first procedural ruling in the case last week, denying SEA’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Those defending the SEA and Gulla had argued Barrows failed to bring the case within 180 days of the alleged behavior.
McCafferty said Barrows was working for Gulla within the 180-day period and stressed the legal standard for dismissing the case was to consider the matter in the light most favorable to the one who sued in the first place.
“Although Barrows has not expressly alleged any specific act of discrimination or harassment occurring within 180 days before the date she filed her charge, she has expressly alleged that Gulla’s discriminatory and harassing conduct occurred with such frequency that it is impossible for her to identify the specific instances with particularity,” McCafferty wrote.
Barrows maintained she was terminated for assisting a co-worker in dealing with an unrelated disciplinary dispute.
Lawyers for the SEA and Gulla said Barrows had been terminated, but after a grievance hearing in August 2017, Gulla agreed to reduce the punishment to a retroactive, two-month suspension without pay.
Following that hearing, Gulla directed Barrows to come back to her job the following week, according to SEA lawyers.
After Barrows didn’t return to work, the SEA fired her for cause, the union stated in its response.
Leslie Johnson, Barrows’ lawyer, wrote in the lawsuit her client was already pursuing studies at the University of New Hampshire and had no interest in returning to what Johnson called a “hostile work environment.”
The lawsuit maintains Barrows complained repeatedly to other SEA supervisors about Gulla’s behavior.
Lawyers for SEA and Gulla answered that while working for the union, Barrows never spoke to Gulla about being the victim of alleged sexual harassment or gender bias.
The first Gulla heard of these allegations was when Barrows filed her human rights commission complaints months after she was let go, SEA lawyers said.
In their legal pleadings, SEA and Gulla’s lawyers claim there are 14 proper defenses to the Barrows lawsuit.
A pre-trial conference in the case has been set for Feb. 20.
