Duke University Pays $500,000 For Sexual Harassment
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The North Carolina Supreme Court has upheld a $500,000 jury verdict against Duke University for ratifying a worker’s sexual harassment of another employee.
According to the evidence at trial the plaintiff began working at a division of Duke University’s medical center in 1991. She claimed that a co-worker embarked on an eight-month campaign of harassing behavior which included inappropriate sexual touching, graphic drawings, and obscene language.
Duke University never imposed any significant discipline on the sexual harasser even after the plaintiff reported the problem to her supervisor and personnel officials. A division head stepped in later and transferred the plaintiff to another department in March of 1992.
The plaintiff offered proof at trial that as a result of the harassment she suffered a variety of ailments including crying spells, vomiting, headaches, nightmares, and insomnia. She was diagnosed with depression and post traumatic stress disorder.
The jury found that Dixon, the harasser, committed a battery upon the plaintiff and that the plaintiff was entitled to recover $100 for that battery. In addition, the jury found that Dixon initially caused the plaintiff severe emotional distress and that Duke University ratified Dixon’s actions. The jury awarded the plaintiff $100,000 in compensatory damages for her emotional distress claim. On the plaintiff’s punitive damages claim the jury required the defendant Dixon to pay $5,000 and required Duke University to pay the plaintiff $500,000 in punitive damages. Both defendants appealed and the issue of the punitive damages claim against Duke University was recently decided by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Duke University argued that the punitive damages liability against it, as an employer could not exceed the punitive damages awarded against Dixon, the employee. The Supreme Court disagreed, writing “The objective of compensatory damages is to restore the plaintiff to his original condition or to make the plaintiff whole.” The amount of damages required to restore the plaintiff to his original condition or to make the plaintiff whole is the same, not withstanding ratification by the employer.
Punitive damages, on the other hand, are not necessarily intended to restore the plaintiff to his original condition or to make the plaintiff whole. It may take a different amount of money to deter or punish an employer-defendant like Duke than it would to deter an employee-defendant like Dixon. “An employer who has ratified an employee’s tortious conduct should not be allowed to use it’s employee-limited financial resources as a shield against additional punitive damages.”
The facts in this case occurred in 1992. If those same facts occurred today, the punitive damages against Duke University would have been limited to $300,300. Under a new law enacted by the General Assembly, punitive damages cannot exceed three times actual or compensatory damages or $250,000 whichever is greater.
In this case, the victim’s compensatory damages were $100,100.