She reported sexual harassment by a former supervisor -- and was fired soon after
By
Samantha Schmidt
Feb. 8, 2021 at 9:30 a.m. CST
Kylee Lee thought she had left behind the toxic culture that had defined her workplace for years.
The former military intelligence officer had spent her late 20s working for a male-dominated U.S. federal contractor in Seoul, where she says she was harassed by colleagues and sexually assaulted by two supervisors. She says she didn’t report their behavior at the time because she was worried about losing her job as a young woman at the start of her career. She stayed with the company, Black Box Network Services, and in 2017 was relocated to the firm’s office in Herndon, Va.
But in January of 2018, she said she received a message from the program director of the office in Seoul, the same supervisor who she said had sexually assaulted her years earlier. He was in town visiting the Herndon office, he said, and wanted to meet with her, alone.
It was months after the dawn of the #MeToo movement, when Lee had heard stories of scores of women harassed by predatory men in their workplaces. After receiving the message, she said she decided to report the allegations from her time in Seoul to the company’s human resources director, hoping to see an investigation.
. . .
Lee’s case also provides a window into an industry of federal contractors that has boomed under the Trump administration but that has long been criticized as lacking oversight and protections for workers, who are often at-will employees. Government contractors are frequently among the top violators of workplace laws but provide little recourse for workers when their rights are undermined, according to a recent report from the liberal policy institute and advocacy organization Center for American Progress Action Fund.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/08/retaliation-federal-contractors/
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