The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Mother, daughter claim harassment — by same state Judicial Branch supervisor
Lynn Maille isn’t the type to complain. She’s quiet, described by her colleagues in public records as a hard worker and someone who can calm angry visitors to the clerk’s office at the Juvenile Matters court in Rockville where she has worked as an administrative assistant since 2005.
So when Tracey Doulens, a visiting deputy clerk for the Juvenile Matters court, witnessed Maille snap at her supervisor, Jonathan Garow, on March 2, 2018, it was out of character. Doulens warned Maille not to be “snippy” with Garow, according to an investigation by
“I’m not there and he still is and that really pisses me off.” Jessica Bianco, former state Judicial Branch employee
the Judicial Branch’s Human Resources Department.
That was the final straw. Maille’s perceived insubordinate behavior was the tipping point. She showed Doulens her phone, finally revealing what she had endured for years.
“Make sure you bring your bikini to come over for a swim or wear nothing at all,” read a text message Garow had sent Maille, according to the internal investigation report. Another referenced grabbing her butt, according to Doulens’ testimony in the internal investigation.
This was just the tip of the iceberg, the internal investigation showed. Maille’s complaint and lawsuit is one of 100 sexual harassment complaints filed with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities over the past five years and reviewed by Hearst Connecticut Media.
By the time she showed Doulens the text messages, Maille had spent years silently fending off harassment at the hands of Garow,
the internal probe concluded, and now, finally, someone else knew about it.
At Doulens’ direction, Maille said she filed a formal complaint with Judicial District Chief Clerk Roy Smith, who forwarded the complaint to the Human Resources Management Unit. The two month internal investigation by Judicial Human Resources substantiated her allegations in no uncertain terms.
“This investigation was able to substantiate that Mr. Garow sent Ms. Maille numerous text messages that were sexual in nature, touched her inappropriately while at work and also inferred that he would assist her in obtaining a promotion in exchange for sexual favors,” the report concludes.
“Mr. Garow’s actions constitute quid pro quo sexual harassment,” investigators wrote. His actions “towards Ms. Maille were egregious and displayed a clear lack of sound leadership in violation of Judicial Branch Policy.”
The internal investigation filed by Christopher Donelly, a court planner for Judicial Human Resources, is dated May 3, 2018. On June 1, 2018, Garow was permanently transferred from his position as the deputy chief clerk for juvenile matters in Rockville, which he had held since 2004, Judicial Human Resources confirmed. He is now a court planner at a judicial branch administrative office in Wethersfield, according to Judicial Human Resources. He has worked for the judicial branch since 1996, and his annual salary is $105,000. The Judicial Branch does not have a letter or record of placing Garow on administrative leave at any time.
On June 3, 2019, Maille filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the state Judicial Branch for discriminatory employment practices in violation of both the federal Civil Rights Act and Connecticut General Statutes.
Nina Ovrutsky, Maille’s attorney at the New York Citybased firm White, Hilferty and Albanese, said this week that Maille’s case was recently resolved by private settlement but could not share additional details.
A spokesman for the Attorney General’s office provided a copy of the settlement to Hearst on Thursday. The state of Connecticut did not admit to any wrongdoing, according to the settlement document, but agreed to pay $20,000 to Maille. A portion of that will go to her lawyers.
Reached by phone at his office, Garow declined to comment and referred all questions to the judicial branch’s external affairs division. Donnelly declined to comment through a spokesman, who referred questions to the Attorney General’s Office. The spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office declined to comment on the case until the settlement is finalized.
Maille’s lawyers viewed Garow’s transfer as a promotion in title, and argued the Judicial Branch didn’t do enough in disciplining Garow for his inappropriate behavior.
“They have black and white evidence of these messages,” Ovrutsky said. “It’s crazy that they just moved him. It’s our court system. It’s awful that it happens daytoday, in restaurants, schools, law firms. But this is our judicial system. And for the judicial system to turn such a blind eye, I think it’s important for awareness to be spread that this can really happen anywhere.”
It started small
The internal investigation verified harassment dating back to 2014. Maille, who has worked for the judicial branch since 2005, said Garow’s inappropriate comments and text messages started about two years after she was hired.
“It started small,” Maille said during a recent interview at her attorney’s office in New York City. “It started with just little sayings like ‘you’re eye candy.’ Then when he’d walk by me he’d rub the lower end of my back or the higher end of my back, which one of the girls did see in the office. He’d just make little remarks about going out to happy hour, and if we got too drunk I could stay at his house. Just little things started happening like that, and then I started getting the texts.”
Garow had an office policy that required his employees to provide their personal cellphone numbers so he could reach them if they were out of the office. As a result, Maille has welldocumented evidence of Garow’s inappropriate behavior that has been used in the internal investigation as well as in the lawsuit filed in federal court. A sample of the texts Garow sent Maille, as documented in the internal investigation, include:
“You could just send a pic of your boobs… that’s help for now! :)”
“I’ll help with your back and workers comp, you help me with horny!!!”
“You miss me...Cmon, you wish you were here so I could pat your ass...No? Oh.”
“You need to get back. Full time. In low cut boob shirts!”
“Maybe if you drink enough you’ll send me boobs !!!! ”
Maille said she showed her husband every text from Garow, beginning in 2007, and he encouraged her to file a formal complaint. But she said she was afraid of retaliation, and didn’t want to draw attention to herself or make things worse if the complaint didn’t go anywhere.
Any time she’d rebuffed Garow rather than simply ignoring him, she said he would retaliate by taking away some of her job duties, and he’d grow hostile — yelling at her for things like crooked staples. So she stayed quiet.
“I just let it go. I didn’t want to make an issue of it and I just felt I’d go back to my office and work,” Maille said. “(My husband) had kept wanting me to go to the big boss for years, but I was afraid of retaliation because John could also be very … like a light switch he could just turn on and off. So Iwas worried. I was afraid for quite some time, and it got so bad that I didn’t want to go to work. I would wake up in the morning and try to have an excuse to call in sick or something because I didn’t want to face him.”
A familiar pattern
Maille thought she was alone. No one else in the office had mentioned they’d been harassed by Garow.
In 2014, her daughter, Jessica Bianco, also a judicial branch employee, was unexpectedly transferred by the Judicial Branch into the same office, something Maille felt shouldn’t have happened regardless of the workplace environment.
Maille had never told her daughter about the harassment. She didn’t want to worry Bianco before she worked there, and after Bianco started, Maille said she still assumed she was the only one Garow was harassing or would harass. So, she continued to keep the details to herself.
“Being my daughter, I felt at first they should never have put her in the same courthouse as me,” Maille said. “No motherdaughter should be put in the same office … So I just kept it to myself at work. I felt alone there, and I didn’t feel like telling anybody what I was going through.”
Bianco, who also agreed to be interviewed, said it was about two years later that Garow first made a comment about her appearance. Then the text messages started.
“It started just with little things,” Bianco said. “He’d say, ‘I like what you’re wearing today but it would look better if it was more low cut.’ Things like that.”
She recalled an incident in the parking lot when her car battery had died. Garow approached her and she told him someone was on their way to jumpstart her car.
Bianco told investigators Garow later sent her a text message that said, “I’m glad they were able to jumpstart your car for you. If I came to help, I would want to jump you too,” according to the Human Resources report.
“It was going on for a while and it wasn’t stopping and it was getting worse,” Bianco said. “I felt very uncomfortable to even go to work. I didn’t want to go to work. I would wake up and not want to go to work, and I liked what I did.”
By fall 2018, Bianco said she developed depression and severe anxiety. She said she went to a doctor and ended up taking medical leave. That’s when she could no longer hide the harassment from her mom. Bianco, too, had thought she was alone.
“For a week she was calling me and I wasn’t answering and she was getting really worried, so I finally told her,” Bianco recalled.
Finally, Maille told her daughter her own story.
“I told her that I’m going through the same thing,” Maille said. “... I just felt it was better if she didn’t know because I didn’t realize he was doing it to her too.”
They tried to leave
Bianco has two children and needed the job. She really liked it too, and wanted to stay in the court system.
But following the time she took off for medical leave, she said she was unable to deal with the stress
of Garow’s harassment and finally quit, taking a job with Lego. Now, she’s a waitress and works in student services for the New England Tractor Trailer Training School.
She’s happy in her new job. But she’s furious about the circumstances that led her there.
“I’m not there and he still is and that really pisses me off,” Bianco said. “He didn’t get much of a punishment and it happens all the time and these guys get away with it and it’s just not right. And yeah, there’s a lot of people that do talk about it, but can you imagine how many people don’t talk about it that it’s happening to?”
Like Bianco, Maille wanted to leave, but she too needed a new job first. She wasn’t set on staying with the judicial branch, but with more than a decade of service toward her retirement, she wanted to continue as a state employee.
When the deputy clerk position opened in the Juvenile Matters court in 2015, she applied for the promotion. She’d been training for it with Garow, and she was qualified for the job.
She interviewed before a panel of four people. Garow was on the panel.
She ignored his presence and felt confident the interview had gone well. But then he approached her in the office. The interaction is documented and verified as “findings of fact” in the judicial branch investigation.
“Lynne what are you going to do for me if I get you this job,” Garow said.
Maille said she was appalled and told Garow that if she were hired, she’d get the job on her own merit.
When an offer didn’t come, she went to Garow’s boss and asked what she could have done better.
“Nothing,” she said he told her. “You did great, but we went with someone else.”
Since filing the lawsuit in June, Maille has been out of the office on medical leave for a neck surgery. Even though Garow no longer works in the same office, she’s still afraid to go back to work. She’s afraid people will look at her differently now that her complaint is public.
“I’m really afraid to go back,” she said. “Every time I think about going back to work I get nervous, even though he’s not there anymore, because people are starting to find out. I don’t know which way they’re going to think about me. I still, when I think about having to go back, I get this fear in me.”
More than Maille
Together, Maille’s and the rest of the CHRO complaints reviewed by Hearst illustrate that harassment ranges from inappropriate comments, either directly or indirectly aimed at female employees, to blatant sexual assault, and often victims don’t know what to do, if they should speak up or who even to tell.
Maille worked within the judicial system and even she felt unsure of what to do, how to handle the harassment and where to turn when things got particularly bad.
While her complaint is not unique — she is far from the only person to have endured substantiated harassment at the hands of a powerful supervisor — her case shows just how pervasive ongoing sexual harassment and discrimination can be in the workplace.
Any workplace.
“It happens everywhere,” Ovrutsky said. “But I think in her case what’s really shocking is it’s the judicial branch. People go to the court system to fight for justice and ultimately achieve peace of mind and that they’re being heard and things in the workplace are going to be fixed, but here, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Lynn.”
That’s why Maille finally came forward. She didn’t want to be the center of a federal court case against the Connecticut Judicial Branch. But she wanted people to know that harassment is everywhere, and she wanted to believe that if she came forward, she could help even just one woman avoid a similar situation.
“It’s the only reason I’m doing it,” Maille said. “It was a hard life the last 10 years. It needs to get out there that this happens everywhere.”