He Said, She Said

She was a temp. The gal at the agency said the job was just right for her. Ten minutes from her home in Long Beach. Nine-plus bucks an hour. The possibility of a permanent job after three months, with benefits.

She had a child. Her husband, an electrician, was uninsured. They put her in a ninth-floor suite with the building manager. She was 26, he was 42. Two married people, working alone together. This was October 1996. It was, she would later allege, maybe three weeks before he stopped her in the office kitchen and told her how irresistible she was.

There’s nothing like the he-said, she-said of your average sexual harassment suit to grind tempers into raw relief. Just the term can send knees a-jerking: It takes two to tango. Or: Bullies should get fired. Or: Victimhood shouldn’t pay.

But this case--the latest in a short, but mildly troubling series--also has some public interest: The employer being sued is Los Angeles County’s biggest contractor, Tutor-Saliba Corp. Taxpayers know it as the love-’em-or-hate-’em construction company that got into trouble on the Red Line, that bounced back with the Alameda Corridor--and that has staked billions of dollars’ worth of public works contracts on the standard vow that, among other things, sexual harassment among its employees is not condoned.

“He said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he goes, ‘What do I do if I just want to go up and kiss you?’ ”

She is on the phone from Santa Maria, where she moved after she filed her lawsuit. “I was shocked and I told him, ‘You just don’t do those things.’ He apologized. I never thought it would end up how it did.”

Three weeks later, both say, he invited her to lunch and drove instead to a hotel. He and his lawyer say they checked in and had sex. She says that, furious, she refused to get out of the car. He says she liked him. She says: “I’d say, ‘I cannot work in this place if you’re going to treat me like this. I’ll never be with you. I love my husband.’ And he’d tell me he was sorry, and that he knew what he was doing was wrong and he’d stop.”

He acknowledged that one day after she became permanent, she opened the door to his office and found him naked and in a state of arousal. She says he called her in and then asked her to watch him masturbate.

“I was afraid that if I told anyone, I’d get fired,” she says. His lawyer says she didn’t tell because she liked the attention. She says she and her husband anguished: her troubled boss versus the need for that insurance, her pay.

Finally, in April, she alleges, he told her he’d been by her house. It scared her and she went to his boss, the No. 2 guy at the company. She was warned, she says, that in a two-person office it would be her word against his. The company investigated, told her he’d denied it, that it would put the building fix-it guy in the office with them and see how that worked. That was her last day.

Her suit has been in Long Beach Superior Court for about a year. In that time, it has become a he-said, they-said: A cleaning woman and another ex-secretary have sworn that the manager exposed himself to them too. (He says the janitor caught him changing; his lawyer has no response yet to the other charge.) Another former co-worker, in a declaration filed by her lawyer, claimed that women in the building complained constantly to him and others at the company about the guy. Court papers include a 1996 report done for the MTA by a labor compliance auditor that warned that Tutor-Saliba’s “program for handling harassment complaints does not meet the standard of California law.”

The report mentions other harassment allegations, including one from a woman on a subway project who eventually sued. Tutor-Saliba’s lawyer said the auditor jumped to conclusions and had a vested interest in prolonging his contract by blowing isolated beefs into “patterns.” Still, the woman got a settlement, and the report lives on: An MTA worker has now gone to court, claiming he was wrongfully fired for lying on his job application after he defied his boss’ order to contradict the auditor.

Well, sexual harassment is murky, but Tutor-Saliba does a lot of business with taxpayers, who might reasonably wonder, uh, what’s up? Ron Tutor, the company president, said that “in 35 years we were never hit with a sexual harassment suit. Now we have three or four,” and most are “drivel.” In this case, he said, the woman’s complaint was the first he’d heard of her boss, one of thousands of far-flung employees in “a building that we own, that I see about once a year.”

“When it came out in his deposition,” Tutor said, “I fired him on the spot. Ten years with this company. I sat and watched him break down, I said, ‘You got what you deserve, you need help.’ ”

This happened six months ago, he says--a year after she first complained. “So what was the holdup?” she says.

Good question, say we.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.