Secretaries / Administrative Assistants, Sexual Harassment

A Legal Secretary's Super-Salacious Sexual Harassment Suit

This secretary didn't want to be a partner's sexytary, and now she's suing.

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As we’ve frequently written about in our pages, whether they’ve been accused of making wildly inappropriate sexual advances or emailing their erotic fantasies to female employees, sometimes law firm partners take things a step too far.

This time, a former legal secretary claims that the former managing partner of the Fort Lauderdale office of Arnstein & Lehr attempted to turn her into his sexytary by allegedly bombarding her with a constant stream of “vulgarity, profanity, and abusive behavior.”

Dasschinka Storani, the woman who filed the suit, began working for the firm in 2008 as a legal secretary to Alan Kipnis, and that’s when the trouble allegedly started. Storani claims Kipnis required her to be available “twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week, three-hundred sixty five (365) days a year” in order to assist him should the need arise. CHECK YOU EMAILS OFTEN, DASSCHINKA.

Storani alleges that Kipnis eventually gave her access to Citrix so that she could work around the clock and be at his beck and call at all hours of the day and night.

From there, Storani’s working relationship with Kipnis reportedly continued to go downhill — in a very sexually inappropriate way. Here are some additional details on Storani’s allegations from Julie Kay of the Daily Business Review (sub. req.):

Kipnis often spoke about his sex life to Storani, saying things like: “Your husband is a lucky guy. I bet you still give him blow jobs. My wife won’t give me blow jobs anymore,” according to the suit.

He also said, “I’ll know when I’ve lost enough weight when I can see my penis” and “If I was 30 years younger, what I would do to you.”

With purported pick-up lines like these, we know you must be interested in dating the likes of Alan Kipnis. The line to court important law firm men starts here, ladies.

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Worse yet, Storani alleges that Kipnis forced her to “inject him in the buttocks with vitamin B-12” because his own wife refused to do so. You may think your boss is an ass, but at least you don’t have to look at his ass like Storani claims she had to do.

Here are two paragraphs from the complaint where it seems like Storani implies that Kipnis was propositioning her for sex during his work-related business trips:

43. Mr. Kipnis also enjoyed speaking to Mrs. Storani about the sex life of another law firm partner, specifically, how that partner could not perform sexually and fathered the most recent child had by this other partner’s secretary.

44. In an effort to add credibility to the story how this other partner fathered the secretary’s most recent child, Mr. Kipnis would tell Mrs. Storani that the secretary would attend business trips with the other partner and that Mrs. Storani could accompany Mr. Kipnis on “similar” trips.

In her complaint, Storani goes on to claim that Arnstein & Lehr was supposedly well-aware of Kipnis’s alleged behavior, but did nothing to stop it because of his “significant book of business comprised of banking and finance industry clients.” Hmm, the bigger your book of business, the bigger a creep you can be?

It wasn’t until March 2013 that another legal secretary — who had recently quit because she apparently just couldn’t take it anymore — wrote a letter to firm management complaining about Kipnis and his alleged penchant for perversion. Arnstein & Lehr launched an investigation, one that Storani participated in, which concluded with Kipnis’s removal from the Fort Lauderdale office.

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Storani claims that because Kipnis was unhappy with his “eviction” from the office, the firm then had the gall to retaliate against her for making complaints about her former boss’s inappropriate behavior, which she alleges ranged from verbal abuse and lewd comments to fraudulent receipts and billing entries.

Storani contends that the firm accused her of “stealing time” to the tune of $27,000 — hours she worked remotely via Citrix, per Kipnis’s demands, and hours that were never questioned until Kipnis was banished from the Fort Lauderdale office. The firm didn’t find Storani’s explanation acceptable, and fired her in August 2013.

Storani is now seeking back pay, front pay in lieu of reinstatement, compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney fees and costs. It could cost Arnstein & Lehr a pretty penny to make these allegations go away. Jeff Shapiro, the firm’s chairman, says his firm has “no basis for any liability,” and will fight Storani’s suit tooth and nail.

Why not settle this suit quickly, before the firm is embarrassed any further by Alan Kipnis and his purported proclivity for inappropriate pillow talk about his penis?

(Flip to the next page to see Dasschinka Storani’s full lawsuit against Arnstein & Lehr.)

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