Contractor, Ex-Manager Guilty of Sex Harassment

A former secretary who says she was sexually harassed by a supervisor when they worked for one of Southern California’s largest construction companies has been awarded $275,000 by a Superior Court jury in Long Beach.

Brenda Perez, 29, now a resident of Santa Maria, said that Craig Wiberg, 45, a building manager with the Tutor-Saliba Corp., exposed himself to her, asked her to kiss him and invited her to join him for a tryst at a local hotel.

She said she refused his advances, but kept silent for months.

“I was afraid that if I told anyone, I’d get fired,” she said.

Finally, in April 1997, after Wiberg told her he had been by her house, she complained to top management. She left the firm, and Wiberg later was fired.

During the trial, a cleaning woman and another former secretary testified that Wiberg had exposed himself to them, too. Another former co-worker, in a deposition filed by Perez’s lawyer, said that women in the building had complained repeatedly to him about Wiberg’s behavior.

Court documents included a 1996 labor compliance auditor’s report warning that Tutor-Saliba’s “program for handling harassment complaints does not meet the standard of California law.”

The company replied that the auditor had jumped to conclusions and had a vested interest in prolonging his contract by misrepresenting isolated incidents as “patterns.”

The verdict against Wiberg and Tutor-Saliba was handed down Thursday in the court of Judge Margaret Hay.

“I just hope that, just maybe, this will give women who are put in similar situations some encouragement to come forward, and not be silent and just walk away,” said Perez’s lawyer, Phillip Heller.

Belle C. Mason, who represented Wiberg, said the plaintiff’s lawyers, who had been asking for $3.9 million, turned down an earlier settlement offer of $600,000.