A former Bonneville Hot Springs Resort massage therapist says the resort’s former owner sexually harassed her and at least a dozen women at that resort and Carson Hot Springs Resort, LLC, according to a lawsuit filed in Skamania County Circuit Court.
Former Bonneville owner Purfil “Pete” Cam initiated “unwanted touching, embracing and fondling” of massage therapist Holly Nelson, including “pushing up against her and rubbing his clothed erect penis on her backside,” says Nelson’s lawsuit.
Nelson left her job at Bonneville as a massage therapist in early 2016 because of Cam’s alleged harassment, says the lawsuit, which also accuses General Manager Marfa Scheratski of not stopping the alleged behavior.
Cam and Scheratski co-owned Bonneville Hot Springs Resort, Inc. and Carson Hot Springs Resort, LLC, the lawsuit says. Bonneville Hot Springs, it says, was sold in fall 2016 shortly after its owners learned of Nelson’s allegations “as a means to avoid corporate liability, transferring all or a substantial portion of the profits of the sale to themselves individually” and to Carson Hot Springs Resort.
No dollar amount is listed in the lawsuit, filed Wednesday. Nelson, who began work at the resort in 2012, is seeking damages for emotional distress, lost wages and attorneys’ fees, and for assault and battery.
Bonneville Hot Springs Resort, in North Bonneville, was sold in 2016 to Foundations Recovery Network, a Tennessee-based mental health and substance abuse company. Carson Hot Springs Resort is in Carson.
Scheratski, the lawsuit says, “aided, abetted and incited discrimination, retaliated against women who complained, and failed to take any meaningful remedial action to prevent Cam’s sexually aggressive and predatory conduct toward women employees, and actively worked to conceal a pattern of sexual harassment and retaliation by Defendants spanning a period of years.”
A Carson Hot Springs Resort employee said Thursday that Cam was not at the resort. A voicemail left for Cam was not returned Thursday. Attempts to reach Scheratski Thursday also were not successful.
This is not the first time Cam has been accused of sexual harassment, said Nelson’s attorney, Greg Ferguson of Vancouver. And the federal government shutdown may have stalled an investigation of Nelson’s claims, Ferguson said.
In 2007, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Cam, who eventually settled with the government, paying a $470,000 fine with an agreement that Bonneville would issue new internal policy barring further discrimination and retaliation against female employees, Ferguson said in a news release. The agreement also called on the resort to conduct annual sexual harassment training for employees and managers for three years following the settlement.
Nelson also filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC in December 2016. Following a yearlong investigation, the agency concluded that reasonable cause existed to conclude that sex discrimination had occurred, according to Ferguson.
“I find that there is reasonable cause to believe that (Nelson) was subjected to an ongoing pattern of unwelcome touching and comments of a sexual nature by Purfil Cam during the course of her employment,” says a July 19, 2018, letter from the EEOC’s Seattle field office.
