By Gina Tabonares
Variety News Staff

THREE former female employees of Leo Palace Resort in a federal discrimination complaint filed a separate sexual harassment and discrimination complaint against their former employer before the U.S. District Court of Guam.
Jennifer Holbrook, Vivienne Villanueva and Rosemarie Taimanglo filed their civil case against Leo Palace Resort Manenggon Hills and 10 unnamed employees of the resort after they were allowed by the court to be intervenors in the case earlier filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In their complaint, Holbrook, Villanueva and Taimanglo named the resort employee who subjected them to sexual harassment.
According to them, Christine Camacho, a hotel front desk officer, engaged in a persistent pattern of severe and persuasive harassment, making sexually explicit, vulgar comments to the complainants. They said Camacho touched them inappropriately, which created a hostile environment at work.
The complainants said Leo Palace Resort management did not act on their complaint when informed about Camacho’s unwanted actions and instead, tolerated the sexual harassment by reducing the complaining workers’ schedule and through hostile interaction during work hours.
Because of the hostile work environment, the three employees resigned from their jobs after efforts of asking the company to take remedial action failed.
When they lost their hope with the resort management, they decided to seek the help of the EEOC, which immediately conducted an investigation of the complaint.
Prior to the filing of a charge with the EEOC, the three employees gave the management an actual notice of sexual harassment complaint.
The human resource manager of the company, Mae Paulino, met with the plaintiff-intervenors. Some management representatives acknowledged Camacho’s illegal conduct.
The EEOC investigation found reasonable cause to believe that the women as a class are subjected to a pattern of sexual harassment and retaliation for having participated in a protected activity.
For four months, the parties participated in the EEOC conciliation process but failed to resolve the disputes, triggering the complaint filed before the District Court.
The EEOC filed the civil case against Leo Palace Resort on Oct. 3, 2006, demanding for a jury trial.
The civil case seeks back pay, and compensatory and punitive damages. It also wants to require Leo Palace Resort to institute and carry out policies, practices and programs which provide equal employment opportunities for women, and which eradicate the effects of its past and present unlawful employment practices, and to enjoin the defendant from engaging in future discriminatory practices.
Leo Palace Resort, through its legal representative, Dooley Roberts & Fowler LLP, filed a reply to the complaint and stated that the EEOC complainants were each “contributorily” negligent and consented to the conduct of which they complain.
Roberts said the claimants encouraged the co-employee who was allegedly harassing them to engage in sexual banter, and that the alleged harassment was mutually engaged in between the claimants and the alleged harassing co-employee.
According to the defendant, one of the complainants, Taimanglo, was the direct supervisor of the allegedly harassing co-employee and had full authority to warn and/or discipline her.
Roberts said the work environment at Leo Palace Resort subsequent to the claimants’ EEOC complaint was not hostile such that a reasonable person in claimants’ positions would have felt they had no choice but to resign.
The defense said the complainants resigned from Leo Palace after they were made fully aware that the company had terminated the employee who was allegedly harassing them.
Leo Palace insisted that it exercised reasonable care to promptly prevent and correct any sexually harassing behavior and did not discriminate against the claimants on account of sex.