NJ restaurant manager begged worker to have threesome with wife, lawsuit says

PRINCETON — A woman hired to work as a hostess at a popular restaurant says the manager pressured her for sex and tried to get her to have a threesome with him and his wife.

According to a lawsuit filed August in U.S. District Court of New Jersey, the hostess says she began her first day at the restaurant in February 2016 with an assistant manager complimenting her eyes. She says from there, her conversations with the assistant manager — who was named in the lawsuit along with a general manager and executive chef — got more personal and inappropriate.

UPDATE, June 2020: An attorney for the assistant manager has provided New Jersey 101.5 with documentation reflecting the dismissal of the case, with prejudice. The attorney says her client maintains the allegations in the lawsuit are false, and that the hostess was fired for unrelated reasons. The name of the restaurant and its personnel have been removed from this post.

The lawsuit says the assistant manager would talk about his penis size, ask her about having sex with women, and tried to get her to "sneak around and have sex with him" because, he said, "sneaking around would be so hot."

She said after several weeks of the same conversations, she began to feel uncomfortable, telling the assistant manager she thought she had told him too much about her personal life.

The lawsuit also claims that the assistant manager showed the hostess pictures of his wife on his cell phone in "various states of undress," including some of her naked. Her lawsuit says he pressured her to have a threesome with him and his wife. The hostess said she continued to tell him that she was not interested in a relationship with either of them.

On one night, the hostess said, the assistant manager asked to "show her something" in an empty dining room on an upstairs floor of the restaurant. When they got upstairs, she claimed, he begged her to "PLEASE, have sex."

"(Assistant Manager), I am not having sex with you, psycho!" she claims she told him.

The lawsuit says the restaurant's security footage corroborated her side of the story, but one of the managers questioned whether the hostess was being honest about her relationship with the assistant manager and reprimanded her for drinking after her shift was over.

The hostess said she was afraid to lose her job if she talked about feeling uncomfortable and being in a hostile work environment.

During a meeting with the restaurant management, the executive chef acknowledged that she "should not have to know how to react to this situation," because she should "never have been subjected to this type of harassment in the first place," the lawsuit says.

The hostess' lawsuit says that she felt "extremely humiliated, degraded, victimized, embarrassed and emotionally distressed by (the assistant manager's) behavior."

The lawsuit does not say whether she remains employed at the restaurant.

A person who answered the phone at the restaurant on Tuesday said that the assistant manager no longer worked there. He could not be reached for comment.

The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount for damages including back pay.

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Contact reporter Adam Hochron at 609-359-5326 or Adam.Hochron@townsquaremedia.com