A Texas hospital faces charges that it actively retaliated against 3 female staffers who reported that a male nurse supervisor sexually harassed them.
In the lawsuit, the 3 women who worked at Seton Medical Center Williamson in Round Rock, Texas, accused the hospital of failing to stop this behavior and also of taking disciplinary action against them after they reported the harassment to management.
While the nurse supervisor and the hospital have requested the charges against them be dismissed, a trial court has upheld all of the charges against the supervisor and most of those against the hospital, including those involving retaliation.
The 3 employees say charge nurse John Butler repeatedly assaulted them with offensive physical contact. This contact included approaching one of them from behind and wrapping his arms around her; forcing another into a supply room; and pulling the other's ponytail while saying, "You like it like that, don't you?"
In his request for a dismissal of charges, Mr. Butler argued that the plaintiffs hadn't initially complained about or been offended by his behavior. The judge upheld the charges, however, noting that the women may have been too fearful of retribution from the hospital to come forward earlier.
While the judge did dismiss some charges that hospital management was slow to react to these complaints - Mr. Butler had been moved to a different shift, then transferred out of the hospital - he allowed one such charge to proceed, since the hospital took more than a month to investigate a complaint and disciplined Mr. Butler only for "discourtesy to employees or patients."
The judge also left standing the retaliation charges against the hospital. According to the women, managers filed disciplinary reports against them after they filed their complaints. One was fired after reporting the situation to federal employment authorities. During a pre-trial hearing, the hospital countered that the woman had actually been fired for charting vital signs she had not taken, a claim the employee disputed.
Hospital attorney Edward M. Smith declined to comment on the open case, but Kell Simon, an attorney for the 3 women, cited an early lesson from the lawsuit: "The hospital needed to take immediate steps to investigate the reports," she said, "and to ensure that the women who reported the harassment were protected against retaliation."
Leigh Page
