In Tromblee v. The State of New York et al, 19-cv-0638, 2021 WL 981847 (N.D.N.Y. March 16, 2021), the court, inter alia, held that plaintiff’s hostile work environment sexual harassment claim “far exceed[ed] legal sufficiency.” While defendants did not move to dismiss this claim, the court’s discussion is nevertheless instructive.
The court summarized the “black letter” law as follows:
To establish a hostile work environment claim under Title VII, “a plaintiff must allege facts to plausibly ‘show that the workplace is permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult, that is sufficiently severe and pervasive to alter conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive work environment.’ ” Erno v. N.Y. State Office of Info. Tech. Servs., No. 19-CV-1457, 2020 WL 2736563, at *7 (N.D.N.Y. May 26, 2020) (quoting Gorzynski v. JetBlue Airways Corp., 596 F.3d 93, 102 (2d Cir. 2010)).
Applying the law to the facts, the court explained:
Plaintiff alleges that over a period of at least a year, her co-worker Dominie repeatedly sexually assaulted her, accosted her with sexist slurs and other demeaning language, forced her to view pornography, and engaged in simulated sex acts in front of her, among other affronts. If even some of these allegations are proven, the State Defendants will be held liable for hostile work environment harassment. See, e.g., Tomka v. Seiler Corp., 66 F.3d 1295, 1305 (2d Cir. 1995) (“[E]ven a single incident of sexual assault sufficiently alters the conditions of the victim’s employment and clearly creates an abusive work environment for purposes of Title VII liability.”); Patane v. Clark, 508 F.3d 106, 114 (2d Cir. 2007) (“[T]he mere presence of pornography in a workplace can alter the status of women therein and is relevant to assessing the objective hostility of the environment.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).
As to imputing liability to defendants, the court held that “[t]he State Defendants are liable for this harassment, because supervisory employees, including Barlow and Stander, were continually informed of Dominie’s conduct, by Plaintiff and others, but did little to redress it.”