A car dealership in Golden will pay nine of its former employees nearly $500,000. It’s part of a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after allegations that the company, Christopher’s Dodge Ram, created an environment where employees were openly sexually harassing their co-workers.
“It was very uncomfortable. I changed my whole way of dressing. I started wearing hoodies, I’d tuck myself underneath my desk,” Amanda Lujan said.
Lujan is one of the nine employees now part of the settlement. Lujan says she reported her concerns to management and human resources at the time, claiming things only got worse.
“I started receiving from the sales manager at that time, asking for certain pictures of my body,” she alleges.
A co-worker eventually filed a complaint with the EEOC.
“This is what we do. Our job is to receive those complaints to investigate them and to take action on them,” EEOC attorney Carey DeGenaro said.
According to DeGenaro, their investigation into the dealership found they violated anti-discrimination laws on numerous occasions.
In one case, the EEOC alleges a female employee observed a director watching pornography at work, then cornered that woman in a room and made inappropriate sexual comments.
When she complained, they alleged she was fired.
“In this particular environment, we found that it was really pervasive throughout the management team. There were several individuals who engaged in the same type of misconduct,” she said.
It is the second EEOC case against the company in less than three years. In 2022, the dealership faced a discrimination charge for allegedly not hiring women for sales roles.
Mary O’Neill is the EEOC’s lead attorney for the region and worked on both cases.
“They were throwing women’s applications away, is what we found,” O’Neill said.
The company resolved the first case by paying $935,000 to the women allegedly impacted. They were also required to increase female representation and provide more training.
In this latest case, $480,000 will go to those nine defendants, and a new kind of training will not only be required but monitored.
Lujan is relieved but wishes she had done something sooner and hopes others will.
“You shouldn’t feel afraid, there is somebody out there willing to help,” she said.
