Celebrity chef Rick Moonen’s Las Vegas restaurant has been sued by two former employees claiming they were sexually harassed by a manager.
Attorneys for one of the women, Vaiva Young, filed suit in November in federal court against RM Seafood Restaurant at Mandalay Bay. They filed suit last week in the same court on behalf of a second woman, Jennifer Kennedy.
Both women were bartenders in 2010 and 2011, and they claim the restaurant’s general manager, Paul Fisichella, inappropriately touched them, commented on their bodies and graphically described sex acts he’d like to engage in with them.
The women say in their lawsuits that after they objected to the alleged misconduct, the restaurant retaliated against them.
The suits allege violations of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, violations of Nevada’s law barring discriminatory employment practices and counts of battery over the alleged ''harmful and offensive touching.'' The suits seek unspecified damages, including punitive damages.
In court papers, attorneys for RM Seafood and Fisichella have denied Young’s allegations. They haven’t yet responded to Kennedy’s lawsuit.
Efforts to obtain comment on the women's claims from the restaurant’s attorneys, Fisichella and the restaurant’s public relations company were unsuccessful.
Both women are represented by the Las Vegas law firm Parker Scheer Lagomarsino, where attorney Andre Lagomarsino said Tuesday that their stories had been corroborated by witnesses who are no longer employed at RM Seafood.
Besides denying Young’s allegations, attorneys for RM Seafood and Fisichella filed a counterclaim against her alleging abuse of process and that she had been trying to pry a financial settlement out of them.
Fisichella, in an affidavit, said that Kennedy — then known as Jen Tisch — told him while she was still working there that Young had asked her to get involved in the sexual harassment allegations against him.
"Jen Tisch reported she told Vaiva she had no reason to join her lawsuit and that Jen was upset that her name got linked to this," Fisichella said in his affidavit.
But Kennedy, in deposition testimony filed in one of the suits, remembered that discussion differently.
"Paul was very vulgar saying I have never (expletive) touched you. I have never touched anybody. I’ve never been inappropriate. Have I ever been inappropriate? And I looked him straight in the face and said, 'Absolutely, you’ve been inappropriate,''' Kennedy said during the deposition. ''The only reason I stayed working at RM Seafood for as long as I did is because I was pregnant … and my husband was laid off at the time, so I couldn’t afford to quit RM Seafood.''
Kennedy added that before she quit, she had suffered retaliation in the form of reduced working hours when word got out she may be involved in filing a harassment lawsuit.
Young, in her lawsuit, says the retaliation in her case involved her hours being cut when she complained about the alleged harassment and the employer embarking ''on a pretextual campaign of bogus warnings in an effort to set the plaintiff up for an equally bogus termination.''
Young also says she told the bar manager she planned to sue Fisichella for sexual harassment and the manager ''did not advise me to go to Human Resources or do anything about this. Instead, he told me not to sue Mr. Fisichella because then I would get 'blacklisted' from all of the restaurants.''
Fisichella, however, insisted in his affidavit that, "I have never sexually harassed Vaiva Young and believe I will prevail with the truth in this case wrongfully brought against me and RM."