Jane Quitugua, represented by attorney Stephen C. Woodruff, sued Micronesian Resort Inc. which did business as Palms Resort Saipan.
An employee for 11 years, Quitugua said her termination of employment was “an unlawful, discriminatory manner on a pretext of implementing organizational and staffing changes.”
Represented by attorney Michael Dotts, Palms Resort denied Quitugua’s allegations.
The defendant is asking for a jury trial.
Quitugua said she was employed by the defendant as a front office supervisor beginning on Feb. 16, 1998.
On Nov. 15, 2007, Quitugua said she was promoted to senior assistant front office manager, “and remained so employed until her abrupt termination…on Jan. 6, 2009.”
The defendant’s termination of Quitugua “in the context of ongoing physical, staff, and management changes at [Palms Resort], while retaining male personnel in the plaintiff’s department, and despite [her] 11 years of progressively responsible service to the defendant, constituted unlawful discrimination on account of sex,” Woodruff said.
His client is seeking punitive, expectation, compensatory, incidental and consequential damages, costs, and attorney’s fees “to redress [Palms Resort’s] unlawful, discriminatory, employment policies, practices, and/or procedures, wrongful termination, breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and tortuous conduct.”
Woodruff said other events occurring around the time of Quitugua’s termination “compellingly demonstrate that the actual motivation for the defendant’s action in terminating her had nothing whatsoever to do with business restructuring but instead flowed from unwarranted suspicion of involvement by [Quitugua] in a theft incident in which a personal friend of the establishment’s general manager, Mustafa Isa, was the victim.”
Dotts said if Quitugua had evidence that the front office manager Hye Kyeong Lee had been involved in the theft, “[Quitugua] should have presented that evidence to the defendant.”
Dotts said Quitugua was an “at will employee,” and was properly terminated in accordance with that status.
He said in Jan. 2009, the hotel operations were restructured and Quitugua’s “position was eliminated.”
She was not replaced in Jan. 2009, “but instead her duties were reassigned,” Dotts said.
Effective Oct. 11, 2010, Dotts said “all hotel operations will cease and the hotel will close.”
“[Quitugua] therefore cannot claim damages beyond when her position would have been eliminated had she not been terminated in Jan. 2009,” Dotts said.
