Gals sue NY zoo‘peeper’
He took care of wild animals at the Prospect Park Zoo — and acted like a pig to his female co-workers, a new lawsuit charges.
Brooklyn zookeeper Atu Marshall secretly shot cellphone footage of the women from under a picnic bench, “holding his camera so that the lens is facing outwards towards the legs of the female employees,” according to Manhattan federal-court papers.
The plaintiffs — fellow wild-animal keepers Tierney O’Neal and Justine Wilber — are now suing the zoo, claiming that when they reported Marshall’s creepy behavior, their managers failed to discipline or even reprimand him.
Instead, at one point, Wilber was the target of retaliation, the suit claims.
She was slapped with two written warnings for bogus infractions — then forced to continue “to feed the sea lions’’ alongside Marshall as punishment for her whistleblowing, the lawsuit claims.
It was Wilber who first noticed Marshall trying to sneak videos of her when she was alone with him in the summer of 2015, according to the court papers.
A year later, Wilber caught Marshall sneakily recording her and other women at the picnic table — and she recorded him on her own phone, gave the footage to zoo managers, who only gave Marshall a verbal warning, the suit claims.
O’Neal complains in the suit that she has been forced to continue to work with the alleged ogler, too.
The plaintiffs are suing for unspecified damages.
A rep for the Wildlife Conservation Society called the lawsuit “utterly meritless.”
Marshall could not be reached for comment.