Sexual harassment is definitely not a joke, but it hurts, even more, when you decide to report the issue without the support of the people around you.
18-year-old Emily Houser decided to report Josh Davidson, her manager, for sexual harassment. She was working at Chili’s nearly two years and during all that time she was a victim of these awful actions.
Houser told Buzzfeed news:
“He began forcing me to go on dates with him…He would just show up to my house uninvited and say he was outside and I had to come with him.”
“Over a two-year period, it just kind of escalated into him providing me with gifts of significance and money and flowers and cards and things that I wasn’t really accepting of, things that made me extremely uncomfortable because I was not sure what he expected of me from these gifts…I said no, and he replied in a very pompous way, saying he didn’t care if he got fired if we were together, and he didn’t care if he lost his job because he just wanted to be with me.”
After this, Houser contacted corporate headquarters. They started an investigation, and instead of firing Davidson, they relocated him to another Chili’s in Pennsylvania.
In order to celebrate his last day, several coworkers made the so-called “F*ck Emily Houser” party at the restaurant to support Davidson and humiliate Houser.
The general manager was also present.
One of them posted the cake on Instagram. They commented the photo – “#teamjosh.”
“I didn’t know how to feel, except I just didn’t really feel anything, When Emily saw the photo on Instagram, she felt ashamed. She thought they were her friends…
Then she decided to write a Facebook post about the whole story.
The strange thing is that workers who posted the cake and commented about it removed their accounts from Instagram. Some of them reported harassment towards their Instagram accounts.
Even Emily’s own brother — who also works at Chili’s — liked the mentioned Instagram. Houser described this as “the part that hurt the most.”
“The area director told me, ‘Please don’t assume who told everyone about this case.'”
She thinks it was Davidson who told the coworkers about the whole thing.
“The case was meant to stay only between the two of us. We were the only ones outside of headquarters and corporate that knew about the situation,” Houser said.
She pointed out the support she got was “crazy and overwhelming.”
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