Physical Harm Basis for Sexual Harassment Suit : Law: Woman links outbreak of potentially fatal lupus to filing of charges against her boss at a U.S. Army base.

Lupus afflicting Magdalena Petrucelli had been in remission for five years--until 14 days after she accused her boss at a U.S. Army base in Texas of sexually harassing her.

Now, crippled by the potentially fatal disease, Petrucelli is among the first women taking claims of discrimination-caused disease to federal court under a new law that awards damages for physical harm from sexual harassment.

“This is a tragic example of the very real physical results of what discrimination can do to a person,” said Ellen Vargas of the National Women’s Law Center. “We never heard about this before because the law didn’t allow it.”

In 1991, the Civil Rights Act was amended to award damages as well as lost wages to women who proved harassment. As the first cases from that change filter into court, doctors are stepping up efforts to prove harassment causes disease.

“There is convincing evidence that harassment represents a serious threat to women’s health,” said Dr. Louise Fitzgerald of the University of Illinois.

Petrucelli’s case began last year, when she complained about her supervisor, who had been demoted for sexually harassing several employees three years earlier at the Army’s largest military base in Ft. Hood, Tex.

Petrucelli was a sales clerk at Ft. Hood’s post exchange. In a complaint filed with the Army and Air Force Exchange Service in September, 1992, she said Lawrence Perry twice touched her buttocks and once grabbed her around the waist.

Her lupus, a disease in which the immune system attacks the body, returned two weeks after she filed the complaint. Her kidneys are failing, her pancreas, liver, gall bladder and joints are damaged, and she has come close to death, her doctors say.

In November, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service ruled that Perry did harass Petrucelli, that the stress aggravated her lupus and that the agency “failed to avoid liability by taking immediate and appropriate corrective action.”

It awarded her $63,000 in damages, mostly for medical bills.

But Petrucelli’s lawyers say she deserves $300,000--the maximum the Civil Rights Act allows--because her medical bills are approaching $90,000 already. They were to file suit in U.S. District Court in Waco, Tex., this month.

The Army and Air Force Exchange Service refused comment. Perry, a retired Army sergeant, was fired but is appealing and has denied ever touching Petrucelli in a sexual manner.

But these were not the first charges against Perry. In 1989, the exchange service demoted him for harassing at least four women and threatening to retaliate when they complained. Charges ranged from sticking his tongue in one woman’s ear to growling and making biting motions toward another woman’s chest.

By comparison, Petrucelli’s complaint seems tame, but physical reactions to harassment vary, said Fitzgerald.

Petrucelli is a mother of three and a Filipino immigrant who is a devout Roman Catholic. Her cultural background made her very vulnerable, contends attorney Jim Peterson.

He refused to allow an interview, saying Petrucelli’s symptoms flare even when discussing the case with him.

“She throws up when she has to talk about him and she throws up when she sees him,” said Madonna Sterling of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Doctors say stress can initiate depression, headaches, weight loss and problems with sleeping and digestion, plus contribute to heart attack and other diseases, including lupus. In fact, doctors routinely advise lupus patients to avoid stress.

But proving stress is responsible for a disease’s return, or whether it would have returned anyway, is tricky, Fitzgerald acknowledged.

And few doctors have studied the stress from sexual harassment. There wasn’t a pressing need for such research when the law didn’t provide damages for stress-induced illness, Vargas said.

Still, the National Council of Research Women has listed harassment as causing severe stress, and scientists are racing to add proof.