You will have a job . . . it may be as my mistress, but you will have a job

How do you lose a sexual harassment case if you are an Oklahoma employer?

Consider the pathway paved by the supervisor in this post:

A supervisor actually wrote the line in the title in an email to a woman he was supervising, as the woman was preparing to take medical leave to have surgery.  I came across this email while working on employment discrimination case.  Imagine that, an employer with a supervisor like this one getting sued for employment discrimination!?!  It happened, I defended the employer.   Here is the full email exchange:

Female Employee: Just reminding you I will be gone from tomorrow through the 14th, on medical leave.  I know I will be missed J  Hope I have a job when I come back!

Supervisor: You will have a job when you come back . . . it may be as my mistress, but you will have a job.

This exchange teaches two lessons:

  1. Don’t write anything you would be embarrassed for your wife, husband, mother to read.
  2. If you must write it, remember it could be read in court some day or even worse be published to the world through the Web.

Posted by Shawn Roberts

On this blog, I write about and try to answer practical Oklahoma legal questions. My focus and most experience is in estate planning and business issues including Oklahoma non-compete law. I make a living as an attorney in the law firm I founded, Shawn J. Roberts, P.C. in Oklahoma City. I live in Edmond with my wife Amy and my two children, Sam (19) and David (11). We live precisely in the path of where the "wind comes sweeping down the plains."

1 comment

Wow, That is sad and funny. I will be sure to never say that to a coworker in an email.