Atlanta Employment Lawyer Blog

The law of sexual harassment requires employees who believe they have been harassed to follow their employers’ anti-harassment procedures—which typically require employees to complain to a high company official in order to allow the company to remedy the situation—before they may file a sexual harassment lawsuit. A recent decision from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Adams v. O’Reilly Automotive, Inc., illustrates the perils of failing to file a timely internal complaint of sexual harassment.

In Adams, a female employee claimed that her supervisor had sexually harassed her for more than two and a half years. However she never reported the harassment to company officials, and when she did finally make a complaint through the company’s sexual harassment telephone hotline, her supervisor was almost immediately discharged.

The employee subsequently filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, but the employer moved for summary judgment. The company argued that the employee never filed an internal sexual harassment complaint despite the fact that the company had adopted and promulgated a zero-tolerance, multi-channel complaint procedure for sexual harassment claims, which the employee admitted she was aware of.

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As we wrote in a prior post about the case of Reeves v. C.H. Robinson on sexual harassment, an employee complaining about sexual harassment in the workplace must prove that harassment was severe and pervasive, and not merely sporadic or occasional. Unfortunately for the employee in a recent case, Webb-Edwards v. Orange County Sherriff’s Office, even though she experienced considerable harassment from her supervisor, it was not severe and pervasive enough to give rise to a valid claim of sexual harassment.

Elaine Webb-Edwards was a deputy sheriff in the Orange County, Florida Sheriff’s Office. Her supervisor made a number of sexually charged comments that offended her, such as, “you look hot,” and “you’d look better if you’d wear tighter clothes.” On one occasion, when the employee and her supervisor were riding alone in a squad car, and the employee was speaking to her husband on her cell phone about lunch plans, the supervisor grabbed the phone out of the employee’s hands and told her husband, “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I’m eating your wife.”

After the employee complained about these comments, the supervisor stopped making them, but he continued to look at her from time to time in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.

The employee eventually filed a sexual harassment suit in federal court. The County, however, moved for summary judgment, which the court granted, finding that the alleged sexual harassment was not sufficiently severe and pervasive to create an abusive and hostile work environment. On the employee’s appeal, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the judgment. The court held that even though the comments were made on a regular basis, they made the employee feel uncomfortable, and they were “taunting and boorish,” because they were not physically threatening or humiliating, and the supervisor never actually touched Ms. Webb-Edwards, a reasonable person in her shoes would not have found the supervisor’s conduct sufficiently hostile or abusive to support her claim of sexual harassment. The court did take special pains to note that although it was particularly concerned about the “eating your wife” comment, it concluded that this comment was still not sufficiently abusive, even in conjunction with the other offensive conduct, to establish a sexual harassment claim.

To get a good overview of the current state of sexual harassment law as it applies in the State of Georgia, take a look at the Webb-Edwards case as well as the Reeves case.

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A good sexual harassment case has come out of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals—the federal appeals court for the states of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. In Reeves v. C.H. Robinson, a female employee claimed that for a period of almost three years there were daily instances of sexually offensive language and conduct in her workplace, including profanity that was derogatory toward women (such as “whore, bitch, tramp, slut” and even more disgusting language that we are too modest to repeat here), sexual jokes, and sexually explicit radio programs that were allowed to play in the office. The offensive conduct, however, was not specifically directed at the employee, and most of it she simply overheard during the course of her workday.

The employee eventually resigned and filed a sexual harassment charge against her employer. The lower court dismissed the case on summary judgment, holding that the harassment was not “based on” the employee’s sex because the conduct was not specifically directed at the employee, and everyone in the workplace—males and females—was exposed to it.

On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, and reinstated the employee’s case. Analyzing the “based on” requirement of the sexual harassment laws, the court ruled that “sex specific language”— which is language that is more offensive to one sex than the other—satisfies the “based on” requirement, whether or not the sexually harassing conduct was specifically directed at the employee.

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