(The Hill) — Six women have filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually harassed while working at Tesla and said that the company “has failed to take sexual harassment seriously, from the top of the company down.”
Six current and former Tesla employees filed lawsuits in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging they were subjected to constant sexual harassment by their colleagues and supervisors, according to a release from their attorney.
The attorney, David A. Lowe, said the women were “catcalled, ogled, touched inappropriately and propositioned” while filing six separate suits on behalf of the women on Tuesday.
Five of the employees work or worked at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory facilities, while one was employed in service centers throughout Southern California. The women who filed the lawsuits are named Michaela Curran, Alize Brown, Jessica Brooks, Alisa Blickman, Samira Sheppard and Eden Mederos.
Curran alleged that her direct supervisor told her to “shake [her] a–” for him. She also claimed that he told her that with her “big butt” she should dance like a stripper.
Brown, who started working at Tesla after she had given birth to a baby, alleges that a colleague called her a “cow” who was “milking.” Lowe said that the co-worker referred to her backside as her “wagon.” She also alleged that when she complained to her supervisor, who she says would look her body up and down, he treated the incidents “like a joke.”
Brooks detailed an incident and alleged that HR told her they knew about the accusations when she reported sexual harassment from colleagues and that they did nothing to mitigate it. She says she was then moved from her desk and had to learn a new type of work.
Tesla did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
These lawsuits come a month after another sexual harassment suit was filed by Tesla employee Jessica Barraza, who spoke out against the unsafe environment for women.
“Jessica’s story gave her colleagues the courage to come forward,” said one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, William Jhaveri-Weeks.
He added that, “These many similar experiences show that this is a systemic problem at Tesla. Nobody deserves to be treated this way at work.”
The lawsuits also come just a day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk was named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”
Barraza alleged that the workplace culture at Tesla is influenced from the very top, and previously spoke about how a joke tweet written by Musk talked about starting a new university and naming it Texas Institute of Technology & Science, which would have the acronym TITS.
“That doesn’t set a good example for the factory — it almost gives it like an … ‘He’s tweeting about it, it has to be OK,'” Barraza said to The Washington Post. “It’s not fair to myself, to my family, to other women who are working there.”
