A female employee at Ford Motor Co.'s Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan is suing the automaker after she says her supervisor groped her, showed her lewd photos and repeatedly solicited her for sex.
Ford says it fired the supervisor, Nicholas Rowan, in December after an internal review.
DeAnna Johnson, a 54-year-old African American, said in a lawsuit filed last week that Rowan would call her "chocolate jolly rancher" because "she was a chocolate treat that he wanted to lick and suck on." The suit says he repeatedly asked to see her breasts and spread lies that she had nipple piercings that he could see through her shirt.
Rowan allegedly showed Johnson photos of his penis, as well as photos and video of him having sex with other workers in the plant. Johnson later found out Rowan had had sex with a number of subordinates, the suit says.
Johnson alleges that she told a manager about the behavior and he responded that she should simply agree to his requests "and get it over with." She claims that another manager merely dismissed her complaints.
A Ford spokeswoman, Kelli Felker, said the company interviewed every supervisor who Johnson claimed knew about the harassment but found that the only person to whom Johnson had complained "immediately" referred the matter to human resources officials.
"Ford does not tolerate sexual harassment or discrimination," Felker said in a statement. "We take those claims very seriously and investigate them thoroughly. While we have not received this lawsuit, we are aware of the allegations. The plaintiff filed a Human Resources complaint in November 2018. We launched an investigation, immediately suspended the employee that was the subject of the complaint, then fired him in December."
Chicago litigation
The lawsuit comes a little more than a year after The New York Times published an in-depth report detailing what workers said was widespread sexual harassment at Ford's Chicago assembly and stamping plants.
It wasn't the first time workers at Chicago Assembly had been accused of harassment. Several female workers in 2014 filed a lawsuit against Ford, saying male co-workers sexually harassed them. One of the plaintiffs described the plant as "more like a meat market."
After the 2017 Times report, CEO Jim Hackett visited the plant to underscore his zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment.
In an open letter to employees, Hackett described as "gut wrenching" his experience reading women's accounts of incidents that took place over many years.
"I want to take this opportunity to say that I am sorry for any instance where a colleague was subjected to harassment or discriminatory conduct," Hackett wrote in the letter. "More importantly, I promise that we will learn from this and we will do better."
