She reported sexual harassment by a former supervisor -- and was fired soon after

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/08/retaliation-federal-contractors/



Kylee Lee thought she had left behind the toxic culture that had defined her workplace for years. The former military intelligence officer had spent her late 20s working for a male-dominated U.S. federal contractor in Seoul, where she says she was harassed by colleagues and sexually assaulted by two supervisors. She says she didn’t report their behavior at the time because she was worried about losing her job as a young woman at the start of her career. She stayed with the company, Black Box Network Services, and in 2017 was relocated to the firm’s office in Herndon, Va.

But in January of 2018, she said she received a message from the program director of the office in Seoul, the same supervisor who she said had sexually assaulted her years earlier. He was in town visiting the Herndon office, he said, and wanted to meet with her, alone. It was months after the dawn of the #MeToo movement, when Lee had heard stories of scores of women harassed by predatory men in their workplaces. After receiving the message, she said she decided to report the allegations from her time in Seoul to the company’s human resources director, hoping to see an investigation. “They didn't do anything,” Lee said. “I told her I was raped by this guy in the company who is a director and she didn’t do anything about it.”

Instead, a few months later, she was given her first poor performance review, she said. Weeks after that, she was fired. Lee is now suing her former employer, accusing the company of retaliation in violation of Title VII and whistleblower protection laws. In late November, she filed a lawsuit against the firm, which has since been acquired by Arlington Capital Partners and renamed Tyto Athene. The lawsuit was served on the company last month. Courtney Abbott, an Alexandria-based attorney representing Tyto Athene, said the company denies any wrongdoing or liability in the case, but could not comment further on the pending litigation. Attempts to reach the two former supervisors listed in Lee’s lawsuit were unsuccessful.

Lee, now 34 and a consultant at Deloitte, is one of more than 250 people whose legal cases have been funded by the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, an initiative created by Hollywood stars and activists in the aftermath of the charges against Harvey Weinstein to help victims of sexual harassment at work. Thousands of women have sought legal assistance from the fund since its inception more than three years ago, and their requests serve as a sort of laboratory for studying patterns in workplace sexual harassment cases, according to the National Women’s Law Center, which runs the initiative.

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[SunSeeker]

1. Hope her lawsuit is successful! nt