(Bloomberg) -- Cipriani USA Inc. was sued by a former employee who claims she was sexually harassed by a supervisor and fired after she complained.
Sophia Pak’s complaint comes a year after the New York restaurant company settled a lawsuit brought by a waitress who claimed to have been sexually harassed by the eatery’s owner and his friend, Harvey Weinstein.
Pak claims that “inappropriate and unlawful” texts, comments and “sexually inappropriate conducts” started “almost immediately” after she was hired on September 14, 2021, to work on the opening of Harry’s Table, the posh eatery on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
In the complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court Thursday, Pak accused a consultant hired to help prepare the restaurant to open for business, who was expected to become the general manager, of making lewd comments and gestures.
Cipriani didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
Pak said she reported the harassment to several of the restaurant’s supervisors, including Cipriani’s director and the executive director of human resources. The 20-year-old was told the consultant had been terminated and Pak was then transferred to a different position at Cipriani’s corporate office on 42nd street.
Six weeks after her sexual harassment report to human resources, Pak said she was fired.
Pak “was told it was a financial position and her position was being eliminated: the very position that had just been created for her to remove her from the sexual harassment she had reported,” her lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Plaintiff’s termination was actually because she had complained of sexual harassment and retaliation.”
Pak, who said she was initially hired to be restaurant manager at a salary of $72,800, is seeking unspecified damages including past and future lost wages and benefits, damages for emotional injury and distress and punitive damages.
In 2020, Maria Sol Larrea, a former cocktail waitress/bottle server at Cipriani Downtown Socialista, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Cipriani and Downtown Restaurant Co., alleging that the restaurant’s owner, Giuseppe Cipriani, and Weinstein subjected her to persistent sexual harassment. The case was settled in August 2021. Pak and Larrea were both represented by Phillips & Associates PLLC.
The case is Pak v. Cipriani USA Inc., 22-cv-10383, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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