Harassment at Law Firm Charged

Attorney Ed Masry, who has become famous as the Westlake Village employer of movie subject Erin Brockovich, has been accused in a lawsuit of firing an employee for rebuffing his sexual advances.

Kissandra Cohen, 21, filed a wrongful-termination suit Wednesday alleging that Masry and colleagues frequently made sexual comments, touched her inappropriately and created an unprofessional environment.

Masry denied Cohen’s allegations, and said that she is merely one of many “people coming out of the woodwork” in hopes of profiting from him after the release of the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

The same day the suit was filed, Brockovich’s former husband and a former boyfriend were arrested on suspicion of attempting to extort about $300,000 from her and Masry.

“It’s almost like a cottage industry out there,” said Masry, who has filed a countersuit accusing Cohen of slander. “This happens to celebrities all the time. I’ve never been in a situation like this.”

Cohen said her claims are legitimate. “He’s just trying to cloud the issue,” Cohen said. “He’s trying to intimidate and bully me.”

In her lawsuit, Cohen contends that Masry and others touched, hugged or kissed her inappropriately on many occasions during her eight months at Masry’s firm, Masry & Vititoe.

The suit contends that Playboy magazines were displayed in work areas, that employees regularly used vulgar sexual language and that Masry’s hiring of a Playboy model as an assistant contributed to an uncomfortable environment.

She said she has been unable to find employment since Masry fired her at the end of last year.

Masry said he had never been alone with Cohen and denied that the office was unprofessional.

“I don’t know that we used that kind of salty language around here,” he said. He and Brockovich “holler and have arguments, but we don’t do it in general public,” he said. “My office isn’t a hotbed of Playboy models.”

Masry said he did not know that his assistant once modeled for Playboy until six months after he hired her.

“That doesn’t disqualify her from working for me,” he said.

Cohen, a child prodigy from Tarzana, was the subject of some publicity when she took calculus classes at UCLA at age 11. She graduated from Duke University at 17, and began working as a file clerk at Masry’s firm during her final year at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. After graduation, she worked there as a lawyer.

The firm “had just won a large case and was very prominent,” she said. “I assumed them to be upstanding.”

Cohen said in the suit that the harassment began almost immediately after she started work, and that Masry would rub her legs, attempt to kiss her and demand to see her alone. Cohen would not discuss specific incidents, but her suit claims that on Dec. 26, 1999, Masry called her at home and asked her to come to the office.

She refused to go unless it was work-related, according to the lawsuit, and Masry responded that he just wanted to see her and threatened to fire her unless she came in. When she refused, he called her an hour later and told her she was fired, the suit alleges.

Masry said he fired Cohen because, although she was clearly intelligent, she “lacked common sense.”

“She didn’t want to listen to anybody,” he said. “She thought she knew more than everybody else.”

He also said that after passing the bar, Cohen delayed getting her “moral qualifications” certification, required for membership in the bar association, while still drawing a lawyer’s salary of more than $120,000 a year.

“That’s just a story created after the fact,” said Dan Stormer, Cohen’s lawyer. “He’s making all sorts of allegations against her that are completely untrue.”

Cohen said that she spoke to Masry about her concerns while she was still working for his firm, and that she decided to file the lawsuit when she couldn’t find another job and couldn’t reach a settlement with Masry.

*

Times Community News reporter Tony Lystra contributed to this story.