Gig Harbor pharmacist was drugged and raped by superior, lawsuit alleges
A Gig Harbor pharmacist’s lawsuit says she was drugged and raped by a superior she had reported for harassment and that the hospital system mishandled the investigation into her allegations.
The 37-year-old woman worked at St. Anthony Hospital, which is part of the Franciscan Health System, until she resigned earlier this year.
“Franciscan’s response to my client’s reports was troubling,” one of her attorneys, Samuel Daheim, told The News Tribune on Friday. “My client was simply unable to continue working under these conditions. She seeks justice through this lawsuit and hopes that it will prevent what happened to her from happening to anyone else.”
The lawsuit against Franciscan, filed Nov. 20 in Pierce County Superior Court, seeks unspecified damages.
The health system’s vice president of communications and government affairs, Cary Evans, said in a statement Friday: “CHI Franciscan fosters an environment that is conducive to a healthy and safe experience for all our patients and employees. We take these allegations very seriously and have responded appropriately. This is an ongoing legal matter so we cannot comment further.”
Franciscan did not say how long the superior had worked for the company or whether he was still employed there.
The superior is not a defendant in the lawsuit, and he has not been criminally charged. Daheim said he did not believe his client spoke with police.
The lawsuit gives this account of what happened:
The woman was in training at the hospital in 2017, during which time the superior had control of her working conditions, pay and hours.
He asked her on dates and made inappropriate comments about her looks and retaliated against her when she rejected his advances.
The woman said Franciscan managers did not help when she complained.
“Instead the good-old-boys network took over, and her complaints were trivialized and swept under the rug,” the lawsuit says.
A manager said the alleged harasser had had such problems with women before and that “she should just get to know him,” the lawsuit says.
She invited him out for coffee or drinks as a co-worker, thinking “the workplace harassment and hostility would stop if he felt like she was making an effort to be friends with him,” her lawsuit says. “He assured her that he would be professional and would not be rude and aggressive as he had been so many times in the past.”
Night of alleged rape
When they met Jan. 7, 2018, he grabbed her, kissed her, made sexual innuendos and asked her several times to take Ambien with him.
She objected and made it clear she was there as a co-worker, according to the suit.
As they left they were having a good conversation about maintaining a professional relationship, and he asked her if they could keep talking at his house.
She agreed, remembering the manager telling her that things would be worse if she didn’t try to be friends with the man. She made him promise to act appropriately, the lawsuit says.
He gave her a drink that made her sleepy, and as she went in and out of consciousness, he raped her, she contends.
She woke the next morning and realized she had been drugged and assaulted.
Workplace response
At work he “eventually became more and more hostile, swearing, throwing things, yelling, playing loud music, and used intimidation tactics such as physically blocking her path or making prolonged unreciprocated eye contact,” the lawsuit says. “He also spread rumors at work about the rape, claiming that the two had had consensual sex.”
She ultimately had a meeting with human resources, where she was asked questions she found uncomfortable and irrelevant.
“The Franciscan HR Department’s handling of the report of the rape, harassment, retaliation, and continued hostile work environment exhibits incompetence and poor judgment,” the lawsuit says.
At one point a letter about the investigation with the woman’s personal information and details about the assault was sent to the wrong employee.
In a recent performance evaluation, the woman was allegedly told coworkers were “afraid” to approach her, due to the allegations and investigation.
“St. Anthony’s and Franciscan should be encouraging women to report these incidents and behaviors, not critiquing them for their bravery in performance evaluations nor harboring, facilitating, and protecting a rapist,” the lawsuit says. “Defendant’s actions foreseeably and inexcusably led to the rape and rampant harassment of” the woman.
This story was originally published December 9, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
