Orlando cafe roiled by harassment complaints
Eighteen former employees of the restaurants owned by Jamie and Chelsie Savage have come forward to describe a persistent pattern of harassment or inappropriate behavior by Jamie Savage toward staffers of the Sanctum Cafe in Orlando, Proper & Wild in Winter Park and the Sanctum Coffee & Juice Bar in Altamonte Springs.
Over the past week, 12 spoke to the Orlando Sentinel on the record. The rest spoke on the condition that their names not be published, citing fear of physical or legal retribution by the Savages.
Their accounts depict a yearslong cycle of behavior by Jamie Savage toward employees that included non-consensual touching and demeaning and otherwise offensive comments, ranging from questions about sexual orientation, to unwanted massages, touches and smacks on the buttocks.
He also mocked and verbally abused those who resisted, they said, creating a culture that protected him and punished those who sought help or spoke out.
The Sentinel reviewed emails and text messages documenting
the concerns of various employees who have worked for the Savages since 2016. Employees also corroborated each other’s accounts in interviews and online, where a groundswell of allegations against Jamie Savage has surfaced, each disturbing story drawing others out of the dark.
“I told my mom. I told my dad. I told my husband. I told my sister,” said Caitlin Fertig, who helped Chelsie Savage open the Sanctum Cafe in 2016 “… But I never told the police. I thought [there] wouldn’t be enough. … I feel like I let those girls down.”
The employees interviewed by the Sentinel said Chelsie Savage knew about workers’ discomfort with her husband’s behavior, but deflected or ignored complaints when they were brought to her.
In a statement released through a spokesperson on Wednesday, Chelsie Savage said it was “disappointing” that her businesses had “come under vicious attack with the apparent goal of destroying what years of hard work and dedication have built.”
“We will aggressively defend our business from these unwarranted attacks using all appropriate legal remedies including appropriate cease and desist notifications to those spreading false information about our business,” she said. “We will not stray from our primary goal of serving health promoting food to our valued customers.”
Days earlier, Chelsie Savage had, in a starkly different statement posted to the website for Proper & Wild, said that the “multiple accounts of alleged harassment” against her husband had been heard and he “is no longer permitted on the premises of any of our restaurants and is no longer associated with our operations.”
“You spoke. We listened,” the statement began. “And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.”
It vanished from the website on Wednesday.
Multiple attempts to reach Jamie Savage were unsuccessful. A spokesperson said he was not giving interviews.
Ex-workers: Touching was routine
Fertig, who would go on to climb the ranks from part-time server to assistant general manager at the Sanctum Cafe, was working as a manager for Red Lobster when she got to know Chelsie Savage.
“[Chelsie] was my yoga instructor and I saw her weekly, sometimes twice a week,” said Fertig, 30. “I really enjoyed her classes and thought she was a very pleasant person.”
When Savage asked her to help open the restaurant, Fertig was elated.
“I was so flattered! I didn’t think I was worthy,” she recalled. “She was a Lululemon ambassador with all these great ideas about a restaurant that had an accepting culture and was planet- and communityfriendly, and of course, I wanted to do that.”
At first, Fertig said she worked almost exclusively with Chelsie Savage. Jamie Savage wasn’t around much. Fertig thrived in an environment she says was filled with young, exciting people. Promotions followed.
As Jamie Savage became more involved with the Sanctum, she began to hear disturbing things.
“The first round of girls — I loved them so much, they helped us build [the Sanctum] — started leaving within three to six months. Because they didn’t like Jamie,” Fertig said. “And I feel awful. Because I didn’t listen to that.”
Fertig had dealt with inappropriate behavior from Jamie Savage, including unwanted physical contact, but said she set boundaries early on. At the time, she assumed the women who allowed it were OK with it.
“I come from a culture of restaurants,” she said. “It’s an environment where you have to speak up for yourself, to say ‘No! Don’t put your hands on me!’”
Meghan Badurah, 27, and Victoria Michaels, 25, were two members of that “first round.” On Michaels’ first day she said Jamie Savage “asked ‘if I was comfortable with sexual jokes.’ I didn’t really know how to respond. I just laughed.”
She came to learn that he liked doing his own version of chiropractic adjustments.
“He thought it was OK to crack all the girls’ backs during rush because we were stressed out and he wanted to relieve the tension,” Michaels said.
“It started getting weird,” Michaels added. “He would say that he was a professional yoga instructor and he was just helping us out. … And then it got to a point where he was slapping me on the ass. He did that at least three times.”
Other employees also said unwelcome or uninvited back rubs, back-cracking and massages were commonplace, as were questions about employees’ sexual orientation. Some described more aggressive behavior and said Jamie Savage developed fixations on certain workers. Virtually all of them mentioned his drinking.
The groundswell of allegations against Jamie Savage began with a former Sanctum customer voicing interest online in the business’ support — or lack thereof — for the Black Lives Matter movement. That set in motion a rash of private allegations the user then made public, with names omitted. At press time, the post had 1,723 likes and more than 800 comments.
An early one came from former Sanctum employee Bex Larsen, who worked for the Savages for several months, beginning in January 2016.
Larsen’s online comment references “sexual advances,” overtly sexual texts and discussions of Larsen’s sexual orientation and includes an allegation that Jamie Savage tried to kiss her after walking her to her car. Larsen declined to be formally interviewed by the Sentinel.
‘An un-official policy’
Magdalena Munyon, 25, brought her concerns to her manager at the Sanctum Coffee & Juice Bar not long after she took a barista position in February 2019.
“It was the first week,” Munyon said. “And I said to her, ‘This is going to break Chelsie’s heart, but I feel like [Jamie’s] behavior isn’t just inappropriate. … I should say something.’ And she got very quiet and said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’”
Munyon says she was shocked.
“I said, ‘But she should know this!’ and [my manager] responded, ‘She does know.’”
Munyon’s manager told her of an employee who reported to Chelsie Savage that Jamie had followed her to her car. Chelsie Savage reportedly downplayed the incident, then took the woman off the schedule.
Munyon said her manager did her best to protect her from Jamie Savage, and she tried to do the same for employees after becoming a manager herself.
“We did a few hires. A lot of them were younger than me, 21 and under,” Munyon said. “And almost immediately I began to sense and recognize the same discomfort I had had in my first week.”
It became a common practice, she says.
“I would take them aside and ask if they were feeling uncomfortable,” Munyon said, adding she would coach them on how to escape uncomfortable conversations and situations with Jamie Savage. “I made it clear from Day One that if they needed a shield, that I would do that for them.”
This was also commonplace at the Proper & Wild, said Paige Preston, 29, who worked there as well as at Sanctum Cafe from March 2018 to August 2019, in both lead server and bartender/ barista roles.
“[At Proper & Wild] we had an unofficial policy among the front-of-house staff to not leave one of our female coworkers alone around Jamie, as she had become his preferred target,” Preston said.
Sometimes, though, the restaurant would get too busy and the staffer was left unprotected “to deal with Jamie’s unwanted comments, touching and invasion of her space that stifled her productivity,” Preston said. “He would do this in front of guests, putting my coworker in the uncomfortable position of trying to do her job while shaking him off without causing a scene.”
Rachel Besser, 28, who left a years-long restaurant gig at the Alfond Inn to accept a position at Proper & Wild, said the first few months there were “the best job I’d ever had.”
As Jamie’s presence increased, his drinking was overt and apparent, former employees said, and seemed to fuel his fixation on one particular female employee, they said.
“She is such a sweet, beautiful girl. She worked so hard and is so professional and kind,” Besser said. “Jamie would make so many advances. … I was the server specifically designated to distract him, to keep him away from her.”
While employees took steps to protect each other, Chelsie Savage looked the other way, they said. Badurah remembers an incident in which Jamie Savage smacked Michaels’ rear end in plain view of his wife.
“I was there doing dishes. Tori was prepping food,” Badurah said. “[Chelsie] looked at Jamie and he said, ‘Oh, I meant to hit her hip.’ And it was fine.”
Said Michaels, who described the same incident, “Chelsie didn’t say anything. Ever. About anything.”
‘I witnessed… retaliation’
Fertig said she asked the Savages about it after Michaels was terminated and Badurah left (Badurah told the Sentinel she was taken off the schedule after giving one month’s notice).
“They would say things like, ‘they stole from us, they weren’t coming to work on time, they were requesting too much time off,’” Fertig said.
Fertig at the time was a new employee, too, and says she trusted the Savages. She’s since posted public apologies to Michaels, and others, on Instagram.
By the time Fertig was the front-of-house manager, she said, her eyes were wide open. So much so that she was written up — a form called it “Feedback for Future Improvement,” she said — after refusing to attend a one-on-one, closeddoor meeting with Jamie Savage.
“I told him, ‘Jamie, I’m not going in the office with you. If you have something to say to me, we can step outside where it’s private,’” she recalled. “I wanted the employees to be able to see me through the back door.” Jamie refused.
“He threw a big fit and acted like I was blowing up on him,” she said.
The next day, Chelsie Savage called Fertig into her office, asking why she had refused.
“I told her I didn’t trust him,” she recalled. “He was drunk. I was afraid.”
The write-up played into Fertig’s self-doubt about stepping up. “[Chelsie] told me that I just have a hard time accepting feedback,” Fertig said. “That she would never put me in an unsafe environment.
“But then it just kept getting worse.”
Preston said to her knowledge no other manager brought the issue of Jamie Savage’s sexual harassment and touching to his wife’s attention. Preston witnessed some of the email correspondence between Fertig and Chelsie Savage first-hand.
Armed with texts with disturbing input from employees — names scratched out to afford anonymity — Fertig presented the information to Chelsie Savage, hoping it would be the proof necessary to prompt change.
In the end, though, “Chelsie said there was nothing ‘tangible’ to pass on to Jamie,” said Fertig, who in the email also said that some of those concerned were young “and are nervous about whether or not it will [affect] their employment …”
It did affect Fertig’s employment, Preston said.
“I witnessed Caitlin experience retaliation and the repeated undermining of her role after this confrontation,” she said, “despite her being with the company from the very beginning as one of its staff and guests’ most beloved and respected members.”
Like Fertig, Besser feels a sense of guilt.
“I feel complicit. Why didn’t I do more? But the Savages are such manipulative people,” she said. “They’re master gas lighters.”
Munyon is reflective: “It was a predominantly female workspace, so it’s so strange that we did not feel empowered or that sort of solidarity.”
Fertig recently moved. She has a family. The decision to come forward and speak about the culture of her former workplace required overcoming fear, she said, even after she left the Sanctum Cafe in Orlando, that there could be retribution. Telling the stories has left her exhausted.
But also empowered, she said. Many of the alleged victims, who continue to support one another as the story develops, say they feel the same way.
“I’ve never really been in this place before,” Fertig says. “But I’ve always rooted for women who have. And so, for my daughter’s sake, this is the kind of culture we need to get out in the open.”