Chapter One

“We worked in this big computer, like a lab. They had these big computers and every day, you know, we would run and maintain these computers like 24 hours, 7 days a week, and they had like a main console. And these guys that were like our supervisors, you know, you’d come in and they might, almost like on the board… They’d have a picture of a black man eating like ribs, and he’d have like all types of sauce on his face, you know. And they would just all the time say stuff like the KKK, and just to me it was like a poisoned environment.”

“They would like always bring up these racial conversations and make these racial jokes. What I would do is I’d just ignore them. I wouldn’t laugh or I wouldn’t listen in, I would just sit there and they would try to pull me into the conversation asking me questions. They started talking about incest, and they started talking about blacks from slavery time, you know, they bred them and sold them, and they inbred them down in the south. And I’m from down south, and so they asked me, they told me a lot of the blacks had sex with their daughters and stuff like that, way back from the Caribbeans. And I would just sit there listening like, ‘Oh my God, I know they’re not saying this.’ And the guy asked me, he said, did I ever have sex with my daughter. And so…”

LBN: “He asked you if you had sex with your daughter?”

GH: “Yeah.”

LBN: “And this is your boss or your manager?”

GH: “He was like my lead.”

“These ten people that were supporting me in the department, they like ruined their lives. They like had to move and lost their jobs and had to relocate, and I could tell you, it was just horrible. It poisoned the whole environment. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it because I lost everything.”

LBN: “So what would you do if you had to do it over again?”

GH: “I would have took it. When he said that, you know, about my daughter, I would have just took it and kept my mouth shut and not tell anybody. Keep your mouth shut and just take it, you know, because if you fight back, it ain’t worth it. The legal system and the justice, it ain’t there.”

“There were two final straws. One of them was when he [had] a pornographic picture of a woman who had a watermelon shoved into her vagina. And [the woman in the photograph] was on a bed, and [she] had stiletto heels on. . . . Daniel took it in front of a group of my peers and said, ‘Oh, look Kristen, we would recognize you anywhere with those heels on.’ I was humiliated, just humiliated and then reported it.”

“Daniel went in a room and pulled out this tray of chocolate dildos and took out one, a big one, and stuck it in my face, in my mouth, and said, ‘Here I know you like to suck on these. Suck on this.’ And I just [said], ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

“‘Look: if this does not stop, if some action is not taken, I will file a lawsuit.’ What wound up happening is that I just kept threatening and threatening and threatening. . . . I said,‘You know what, I keep talking to you about what is going on, he is now the vice president, nothing has changed, and I am going to talk to an attorney.’ I really wasn’t going to at that time. I just wanted him to stop so that I could just do my job without having to be nervous about staying late, about being there alone with him because he was a sexual pervert.”

“The owner truly believed that I made all of this stuff up just to get money. And because I could get no one— literally no one— to corroborate any of my stories except my manager, they really believed that the two of us were trying to rip off the company.”

“I am not leaving the company. I didn’t do anything wrong. If I leave at this point then I am the guilty party because then it looks like I just wanted it for the money. . . . And it had absolutely not one thing to do with the money. It had to do with my integrity and who I am.”