Sexual Harassment Stories and Experiences

Channin, Tennesee

     When I started working for a local chiropractor as the receptionist at the front desk, I knew from the very start that I would have a hard time pleasing my employer, simply because he was a “military” man and I could kind of tell from the beginning that he was a control freak.  After about two weeks into my employment, it was clear that he did not seem to like me very much.  Later, he told me that he did not want to hire me because I was overweight, and he would make ”moo” sounds in front of co-workers and patients.  

         There was one patient in particular was very flirtatious, that from the get go.  He had been known to slap the young girls on the butt and make sexually explicit comments to them.  He had slapped my butt a few times and called me asking me out, and would not leave me alone.  I told the doctor about this each and every time he did something and the doctor would say he would talk to him.  But there was nothing done about this.

     About 3 years into my employment there, this doctor found that his wife was cheating on him.  He had recorded her conversations (FELONY!!!) and found that she was seeing other men.  This man went crazy.  His wife left him.  While she was gone, he filed for divorce.  The girl that was now working the front desk, I will call her Jane, was also going through a divorce.  He informed me that he had not had sex in 4 months and wanted to know if I thought that Jane would want to go out with him.  I told him to ask her.  He insisted that I ask her to see if she would.  I did, she said no.  A few weeks later he came to me and told me how horny he was and asked me to ask Jane if they could “just use each other for sex because they were going through the same thing and there would be no strings attached”.  I said that I would not ask her that.  He said, “do you like your job here”.  So I asked her.  She said no.  I told him what she said.  A few weeks later, he asked me to ask her if she would “just give him a blow job”. I said, “I am not asking her that”.  He said he was thinking of hiring a new office manager and letting me work downstairs again.  So I asked her.  She said no. 

     He called one day, after I had left work, and told me to come to the office, it was an emergency.  I went and he informed me that he had just returned from his attorney’s office and needed to know if I had “ever been sexually attracted to him”.  I told him absolutely not.  I was never flattered by his asking me that.  My self esteem was already a rock bottom because of this person and now he was stomping all over it.

     While all of this was going on, we had weekly staff meetings.  He would bring cartoons of sexually explicit jokes and read them, pass them around and then throw them at me to do with whatever I did.  As if I were his servant.  He would tell jokes, even going as far and making myself and another employee participate in one that involved him bending her over that the waist, pulling me in front of her and grabbing my hips and moving them back and forth as if I were having sex with her. 

     I came into the office one day, and pulled up my recent documents on my computer to work, and what I found was a lot of pornographic pictures.  He had been masturbating at my desk.  I was so disgusted that I cleaned my whole office from top to bottom.  YUK!!!! At the end of the day, on some days, he would take off his shirt, flex his muscles and state “I am GOD in my clinic”.  He did this in front of all of us girls.  We wanted to puke. 

     This man was CRAZY!!!  I started taking more and more time off from work because I did not want to be there but I needed and loved my job, I hated him, but I was torn.

     I was off of work one day and one of the girls, I will call her Megan, called me crying.  She said that while getting an adjustment, remember he is a chiropractor, he had her lay face down on the table and pulled the waistband of her pants up as if to look at her butt.  She was so distraught by this and said that he would never touch her again to do an adjustment or anything, so I told her to leave and come to my house. We decided that we were quitting.  I got together with all of my employees, who had witnessed most of his behavior, and told them what our plans were.  We ALL decided to quit.  This had gone on long enough and gone to far and we were tired of it.

     The smartest thing that I could have done was to keep a diary of everything he said and did.  I kept those little jokes that he had printed off of the Internet and would read and show to all of us girls at staff meetings.  The ones he would just throw at me.  I also made a copy onto a disk of the 200+, yes, 200+ pornographic pictures that were on my computer.  I kept these things in a safe place.  I don’t know why I kept a diary and kept these things but I am so glad that I did.

     I went to the EEOC who could not help me because he did not have 15 or more employees.  I contacted the Human Rights Commission, who said that he had to have 9 or more employees for them to investigate.  When they wrote to him, he denied and even falsified information, to show that he had less employees.  The Human Rights Commission would not investigate.  So I retained an attorney. 

     My case goes to trial on December 8th of this year.  I quit in August of 2004, filed in October of 2004.  It has been a very long, hard, stressful and tiring ordeal for me.  I am on anti-depressants, suffer anxiety attacks, and have trust issues that I never had before.   I have suffered ulcers and migraines and sleepless nights.  The worry is beyond compare.  I have tried to get past these things, but it is so hard.  I will be so glad when this thing is over.  But I need for this man to know that he cannot get away with what he has done.  I want to protect others from him.  Although there is so much more that I could write, I feel that this is a very long post and wanted to share some of the worst things that happened to me while I worked for this maniac for 4 years.  Why I stayed to protect the others and why I put up with his abuse for so long is beyond me.  It was almost like I was under a spell.  I am so glad that I am away from him, but will not be satisfied until someone in a powerful position tells him that he is wrong.

     Thank you for reading my story.  I know it’s long, but I wanted to share this with you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, Effects of Sexual Harassment, Health Effects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.