Shipley owner says ex-workers retaliating
The sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the owner of Shipley Do-Nuts this month is the latest in an ongoing legal fight between the doughnut maker and other former workers over an alleged fraud scheme.
Three women claim Lawrence Shipley III routinely groped them and used racial slurs for Hispanics in a lawsuit filed in Harris County district court earlier this month.
He has flatly denied those allegations, and says the women are retaliating against his company after it fired a former plant manager for allegedly steering more than $1 million worth of contracts to distribution companies he owned.
Shipley sued Julian Garcia, the plant manager, for the alleged fraud scheme in September.
“These people were employed and cared for by my family for over 20 years,” Lawrence Shipley wrote last week. “What they are doing now is nothing more than hateful retaliation for becoming corrupt, entitled and self-serving.”
Murphy Klasing, who is representing Shipley Do-Nuts, said he was unsure of exactly what roles Esmeralda Sanchez, Martha Garcia and Elizabeth Peralta played in Julian Garcia’s alleged scheme.
The three women were employed as housekeepers or for clerical work, and are not publicly listed as owners or partial owners in the 12 companies listed as defendants in Shipley DoNuts’ lawsuit against Julian Garcia. An attorney for the women, Karla Evans Epperson, declined to comment on the litigation against Julian Garcia but said several of her clients are related to him.
Also fired in late 2016 was Juan Sanchez, the husband of Esmeralda Sanchez and a former warehouse worker who Shipley Do-Nuts has accused of setting up his own distribution company with a freight box truck that he bought from the company.
“They started this sort of competing trucking business right under the nose of the company,” Klasing said. “Hilariously, when we shut them down ... all the franchises quit using them, and so they sued.”
Juan Sanchez, however, maintains in court documents that Shipley Do-Nuts was fully aware of his business, with his employers going as far as letting him park the truck on company property. A month after his firing, he sued Shipley Do-Nuts for defaming what he says is his legitimate business.
He also joined the three women in a federal suit filed against the company last April for allegedly failing to pay overtime.
The overtime suit is consistent with others filed against Shipley Do-Nuts in recent years. So too are the allegations of racial slurs and groping, though previous lawsuits have usually cited actions by managers at the company’s Houston plant, rather than against Lawrence Shipley specifically.
In one lawsuit that the company settled in 2008, 15 workers said they were “forced to endure inhumane and egregious conduct” by plant managers. They claimed managers threatened workers with guns and said things such as “killing a wetback is like killing a dog” and “if you kill a wetback, no one cares.”
The suit also accused managers of, among other things, forcing workers to clean used vibrators and dildos, and throwing out applications submitted by African-Americans, who were referred to by a slur.
The manager at the heart of that suit hasn’t worked at the plant since 2008, Lawrence Shipley said.
One of the company’s attorneys said last week that it’s dangerous to believe the three women simply because of Shipley DoNuts’ history of abuses and legal troubles.
robert.downen@chron.com.