A Vail condo association and its owner must pay a $1 million settlement to eight Mexican workers after a manager sexually harassed women, including one instance in which he stripped and attacked a housekeeper who was cleaning a room.
Vail Run Resort, a 54-unit timeshare in the wealthy ski resort town, defended the manager by firing workers who complained, paying his legal fees after an arrest and threatening a charity that was helping women file complaints against the company.
While the penalty doesn’t rank among the largest settlements between the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a company, it is a sizable amount considering Vail Run Resort is not a large company, said Mary Jo O’Neill, a regional attorney for the EEOC.
“The behavior was really egregious,” O’Neill said Friday. “What happened to these women was awful.”
The case illustrates the vulnerability of immigrants who are living in the country illegally and how their bosses can use their immigration status to control and abuse them.
One of the women involved in the Vail case, Maria Luisa Baltazar Benitez, told The Denver Post that she endured an attempted rape, harassment and insults before mustering the courage to come forward.
“It’s not about the money but about the justice that needed to happen,” Baltazar Benitez said. “I’m going to keep working at my job as normal. There are things I won’t forget, but I have my dignity. And justice. The guilty will pay.”
Vail Run Resort and its management company, Global Hospitality Resorts, agreed Thursday to the settlement with seven women and one man. The settlement, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, also included another $50,000 to be paid for a bilingual monitor to oversee company employment practices for five years, according to a consent decree filed in court.
The company agreed to rewrite its employment handbook in English and Spanish and to send its managers to hours of annual training on employment laws and sexual harassment.
Efforts to reach Vail Run Resort’s attorney and its owner were unsuccessful. The company did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement agreement.
Omar Quezada was hired as housekeeping supervisor in August 2011, and his sexual harassment was rampant throughout the department until he was fired after a second arrest, said a lawsuit filed in July. He showed cellphone pictures of nude men and women, told graphic and sexualized stories during lunch breaks, and groped women as they tried to clean rooms.
“We were very afraid of being left alone with him,” Baltazar Benitez said.
If a housekeeper asked for a better schedule, more work hours or a promotion, Quezada made it clear he expected sexual favors in exchange, the lawsuit said.
“I told him I would rather stay in housekeeping a thousand times rather than be your assistant or a supervisor,” Baltazar Benitez said.
Quezada also told the women that they were ignorant and uneducated, and he used derogatory terms for Mexicans. On multiple occasions, he told workers that immigration authorities had arrived, causing them to run and hide, the lawsuit said.
In early 2012, the women met with the Vail Run Resort controller to complain, but their complaints were not taken seriously, the lawsuit said.
Baltazar Benitez said she was afraid to report Quezada to authorities even after he stripped off his clothes and tried to attack her in a room and even after her hours were cut.
Baltazar Benitez went forward only after he started insulting her as a mother, threatening her sons and boasting about having his way with any woman he wanted.
“If they did something to him or they didn’t, I still had to report him,” she said. “I was afraid, but I knew this was not right and I had to do something.”
A friend escorted her to the Vail Police Department and translated for her. The friend also connected her with Catholic Charities, who assisted her in filing a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division.
Vail police took the complaints seriously. O’Neill, the EEOC lawyer, said it is unusual for these situations to result in criminal charges.
Quezada was fired from Vail Run Resort after a second arrest in connection with the sexual harassment complaints, and Global Hospitality owner William Fleischer offered him a job at one of his other properties, the lawsuit said.
Quezada later was convicted by an Eagle County jury of unlawful sexual contact and felony extortion. He pleaded guilty to similar charges in the second case. The resort and its owners paid $1,700 toward his defense attorney’s bills, the lawsuit said.
A new housekeeping manager was hired and was told to “clean house.” She fired the two women who had filed police reports against Quezada. She also fired the husband of one of the women. He worked in the laundry room and had demanded his wife be paid for the work she had performed that week, the lawsuit said.
Police escorted the couple off the property.
After Catholic Charities helped file Baltazar Benitez’s complaint, Fleischer threatened to have the agency’s funding cut if it did not stop helping with the complaint, the lawsuit said.
Qusair Mohamedbhai, whose firm assisted with the case, said the penalty was an important step toward addressing abuse of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
Sexual harassment of Latina workers happens too often, he said.
In October, Smokin’ Spuds and Farming Technology, Colorado subsidiaries of Mountain King Potatoes, agreed to a $450,000 settlement because Latina farm workers were subject to sexual touching, comments and gestures. Workers at the San Luis Valley companies also said supervisors retaliated when they complained.
In 2015, the EEOC also went after companies in Florida and California where Latina workers were propositioned, groped and raped. Most of the cases involved the agriculture industry, including one $17 million penalty against Moreno Farms in Florida, where a supervisor and his brother raped women and threatened to fire those who refused to have sex with them.
But the Vail case and its backdrop of wealthy tourists were striking to attorneys who said the people who clean rooms and work in other manual labor jobs go largely unnoticed.
The scope of the agreement “reflects the seriousness and magnitude of the problem facing oppressed employees in the playground of the ultra-wealthy that is Colorado’s Vail Valley,” Mohamedbhai said.
Noelle Phillips: 303-954-1661, nphillips@denverpost.com or @Noelle_Phillips
