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Culture May 9, 2017
This is not a good look for the already floundering brand.
“Black ho”, “ni**er hair” and “black slut” — those are just a few of the racial slurs Tatyanna Scott says she was subjected to while working at Hollister, a brand of Abercrombie & Fitch, in New York City.
Scott filed a federal lawsuit against the clothing company on Monday, adding to the long list of lawsuits Abercrombie has had to fight in the last couple of years, many of which stem from discrimination claims and Abercrombie’s treatment of employees. (You can read about them here, here and here).
In Scott’s case, obtained by ENTITY, she claims she was subjected to both racial and sexual slurs while working as an overnight stocker from October 2014 to June 2015 at the 5th Avenue store.
Specifically she says her manager, a man named Joel Binns, made it clear she was only hired for her looks and propositioned her for sex on numerous occasions. Scott says she refused Binns’s advances for over a month and a half and then reluctantly gave in. She says they eventually had sex in the “orientation room”, which was known among the employees as the “boom room”.
After the tryst, Scott says her manager gave her extra hours, which meant extra money. Scott says Binns also made it clear, if she wanted to keep her job she would not say anything to Human Resources. After the second sexual interaction Scott says she told her manager she didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. In fact, she says she never really consented to the first encounter, instead she felt forced into it. “It was unwelcome contact by a supervisor with power,” says Scott in legal docs.
However, according to Scott, her rejection was met with retaliation.
First, she says, her manager stopped talking to her and then the other employees began harassing her, calling her names like “ni**er bitch”, and “nappy hair”. She says Binns, her manager, turned all the employees against her and created such a hostile work environment it was impossible to work.
Eventually, Scott claims, an upper manager spoke to Binns about the situation and Binns yelled loudly in front of everyone: “Tatyana fucks the managers! She’s a ho. She’s dirty and has dirty ni**er hair.”
Worse, Scott says Human Resources was aware of all this and did nothing. In fact, she says one employee hit her over the head with a phone and was fired, but only because the incident was caught on camera.
Scott claims the sexual harassment and racial slurs became so overwhelming she gained 20 pounds and now suffers from PTSD.
In a witness statement, a fellow Hollister employee corroborated her claims.
“Tatyanna was called a ‘ho’ and everyone was quiet for a moment,” claimed the witness in a written statement. “Later the managers said, ‘Don’t call the 1 number because we’ll find out who complained.”
The “1 number” refers to a line employees could use to complain about harassment. The witness also claimed their manager, Binns, would only hire hot women and made sure that “gays and bisexuals” worked away from him. “He was very open and he clearly got away with it,” stated the witness.
Ironically, Scott was fired from Hollister in 2015 for allegedly creating a “hostile work environment” with the other employees.
Scott is demanding her lost earnings as a result of being fired, along with compensatory damages for mental anguish, loss of dignity, humiliation and injury to livelihood.
