‘I don’t want anyone else to be a victim’
Restaurant boss sexually harassed me, server claims
KITCHENER — Server Jill Coture worked for a restaurant boss who assaulted her on the job, repeatedly poking or pinching her or flicking at her arm or elbow.
That’s what a criminal court found. But really her bad boss behaved even worse, Coture says in a sexual harassment complaint.
Coture, 46, claims Criss Voulcaridis, 31, grabbed her breast twice and she had to smack him. She claims he smacked her rear with an open hand.
She claims he demanded to know if he aroused her. She claims he asked her to bring a vibrator to work so he could watch her use it in the bathroom.
She claims he kept trying to undo her bra, told her he wanted to have sex with her, talked about his penis and also said: “You and I are going to have a baby together.”
She became so uncomfortable she stopped using the staff bathroom next to his office, instead using the public washroom at the
business next door.
“It was just a bad place to work. The atmosphere was terrible,” Coture says. “You were walking on eggshells.”
Coture quit after four months in 2016. Voulcaridis later closed his restaurant, Papa Joe’s Hot Kettle in Ayr, and went back to work at his father’s Country Boy restaurant. His father, Terry Voulcaridis, said his son no longer works at Country Boy.
Coture is seeking $50,000 from him in a sexual harassment complaint she filed with Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal. Her allegations have not been tested there.
But the Ontario Court of Justice has tested Voulcaridis. In December he pleaded guilty to assaulting Coture and two other female servers after a prosecutor dropped sexual elements from the charges against him.
The judge who accepted his guilty plea praised him for being “a person otherwise of excellent character,” fined him $300, and granted him a conditional discharge. It keeps him out of jail and without a criminal record if he behaves for nine months.
“I don’t think justice was served whatsoever,” Coture says.
In court she was devastated to hear the judge praise her former boss. But she doesn’t regret complaining about him, which led to the criminal prosecution and to a human rights case which is resuming now that criminal charges are resolved.
“I didn’t want anybody else to be a victim,” Coture said. She’s seeking compensation for hurt feelings, anguish and lost wages.
Voulcaridis did not return a call for comment. “He denies the allegations and will be defending them before the tribunal,” said his lawyer, Darrell Hawreliak. “Given it’s before the tribunal, that’s where it has to be dealt with.”
Coture found a new server’s job soon after quitting. She’s happy there.
Her experience and its aftermath have inserted her into the #metoo movement that’s been exposing male bosses behaving badly.
In court she heard the female prosecutor and male judge spar over the reckoning now underway into the poor conduct of powerful men.
When her sexual harassment complaint made the news, she says she was attacked online for being too old and fat to be sexually harassed.
“It’s disturbing that people are so quick to judge,” she said. “I can see too why women don’t come forward, just because they’re going to be shamed and blamed, and attacked somehow.”