It truly feels like the US is now engaged in a full-on war against women.
According to a sickening new report from Vice’s Motherboard, an 18-year-old female barista at an Ashland, VA Starbucks was fired from her job after she reported being raped by her male supervisor — only for the supervisor to be allowed by the company to keep his job, despite literally pleading guilty to the heinous sexual assault. The supervisor was instead transferred to one of the company’s Richmond, VA branches following his guilty pea, where he was allowed to remain employed by the popular coffee company for another five weeks after he admitted to the rape.
Motherboard identifies the teenage victim in their report as the pseudonym “Claire.” They note that the victim first reported the sexual assault on Nov. 2 of last year to the manager of her Ashland store. She claimed that the supervisor in question raped her at his residence the previous night. The report goes on to note, “Claire also contacted the Henrico County Police Department to report the assault. Court records show that the state of Virginia charged the worker who assaulted her with ‘object sexual penetration by force.'”
“In the following days, Claire said she saw the man who assaulted her working at Starbucks,” the report reads, “and skipped work to cope with anxiety and depression. Starbucks denies that the man who assaulted her worked at the store in the two weeks after she reported the assault.”
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Only 9 short days after she reported the traumatizing assault, Claire was fired by the mass corporation for “irregular attendance,” while the man who assaulted her was allowed to remain employed with the company. The supervisor was eventually fired on April 14 of this year, a full five weeks after he entered a guilty plea and was ordered by a Virginia court to register as a sex offender with the state police.
Speaking with the publication, a worker from the store where the rapist and his victim were employed said, “management was more interested in distributing anti-union propaganda and protecting the man who assaulted Claire than keeping them safe. Thirteen workers there sent a letter to Starbucks corporate on April 22 demanding an ‘official explanation, as well as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing from members of corporate whose job it is to maintain our safety.'”
In a letter obtained by Motherboard, they wrote, “While management never told us of these criminal sexual assault charges, the partners in our store felt increasingly uncomfortable working with him on the floor. He made repeated sexual comments and jokes to partners, while frequently reminding partners of his authority over others. Across the country, partners associated with union organization are being wrongfully terminated without prior written notice for minor infractions such dress code offenses and ‘safety violations,’ but an individual who had been arrested and indicted for felony sexual assault was allowed to remain employed for four months before termination. Clearly Starbucks is more interested in national union busting than protecting its partners from sexual assault.”
Read the full report here.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Starbucks, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
