Tesla sued by employee for alleged ‘rampant’ sexual harassment at factory
A worker at Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory has sued the Elon Musk-helmed company, accusing it of subjecting women to “nightmarish conditions of rampant sexual harassment.”
Jessica Barraza, a 38-year-old mother of two, filed the suit Thursday in California Superior Court in Alameda County.
She said she’s been employed by Tesla since October 2018 and has faced “near daily sexually harassing comments and touching” from fellow workers, supervisory leads and even supervisors themselves, according to the suit.
Barranza, who works nights at the factory, was subjected to obscene comments from male co-workers on the job, including “She’s got fat a-t—ies,” “She’s got cakes!,” “That bitch hella thick,” “Go ahead, sexy,” “Damn, girl!,” “She has a fat ass,” “Oh, she looks like a coke bottle,” and “Girl has an onion booty.”
The suit also alleges that male co-workers often pressed “their groins or hands against her back-side” and chalked such incidents up to working in close quarters.
Barranza “complained repeatedly to managers and to HR, who failed to protect her,” the suit says, and she reached a breaking point in September after suffering “a severe panic attack.”
“She is now afraid to be alone in public spaces around men she does not know,” the suit says. “Her doctor has taken her off work, she is on medication and in therapy, and she is not the same person she used to be.”
Barranza’s complaint compares Tesla’s factory floor to a frat house, and describes incidents in which her supervisor flirted with her and told her he controlled her career prospects.
The suit also claims that one of Barranza’s supervisors suggested to her that she “shouldn’t wear shirts that draw attention to your chest” even though she was “wearing a work shirt provided by Tesla.”
And despite repeated complaints to HR representatives and her managers, no one ever adequately addressed the harassment, Barranza alleges.
Representatives for Tesla did not return The Post’s request for comment.
The suit comes just a month after Tesla was ordered to pay a whopping $137 million to a former contractor who’s black after the carmaker allowed a racist workplace culture to fester.
Tesla responded to the racism suit by noting that the complainant was a contractor and could not prove that he was subjected to a “race discrimination violation.”
“We continue to grow and improve in how we address employee concerns,” Tesla’s vice president of people, Valerie Capers Workman, told employees after the verdict. “Occasionally, we’ll get it wrong, and when that happens we should be held accountable.”
