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Harassment, vulgarity part of office environment, staffers say
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> Timeline | Comment | Photos | Video
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> Dann gives his side, felt 'uncomfortable'
Friday, May 02, 2008
Ben Espy, Marc Dann's executive assistant attorney general for administration, interviewed 23 witnesses during his investigation of sexual harassment allegations involving Anthony Gutierrez, the former director of general services. The interviews reveal an often unprofessional work environment that frequently scratched the surface of inappropriate behavior. Here are some excerpts from those interviews.
• Doug Armbrust, facilities manager under Gutierrez, said he was told by Cindy Stankoski, one of the two women who filed the sexual harassment claims, that she was being harassed by Gutierrez, her boss. "He would look at her, and he would stare at her chest while he was— while he was talking to her instead of looking her in the eyes or something like that," he said. He also testified that he'd heard the rumor that she'd gotten the job because of her "ass."
Extras
• Several witnesses described Gutierrez as someone who would use the f-word a lot — including in front of his 12- year-old daughter — stare at women's chests, and hint at ties to the Mafia to intimidate. Gutierrez also used his close ties to Marc Dann as a way to intimidate. "He also carried a gun and had his office sound-proofed. I think he was a little paranoid," said Armbrust. "I had heard that he felt somebody was getting in his office or something like that on the weekends and stuff."
• Mariellen Aranda, a general services assistant, said she watched Gutierrez say inappropriate things a number of times. "He consistently wanted her (Stankoski) to have drinks with him," Aranda testified. "And there were quite a few sexual comments that were made toward her. It was just pretty consistent. And all the other girls in the office." Aranda, who was friends with Stankoski, said she received a series of text messages from her on Sept. 10, the night that Stankoski went to Gutierrez' apartment intoxicated and said she woke up with her pants buttons undone and Gutierrez next to her in his underwear. (He denied the allegation). The first one came at 9 p.m. Stankoski told Aranda she wanted to talk alone with her the next day. Aranda asked if she was OK. At 9:19 p.m., she got another one that said, "I'm trashed. Won't be there at 8:30." Aranda later got one that said Stankoski was in "a weird spot." Finally, Stankoski called to ask Aranda to pick her up. Aranda got dressed and headed to the car, but called her dad, who urged her not to go. "He said, you go back in your house, and do not get involved in this." Aranda called some friends, and the consensus among them was that Gutierrez was up to no good. One urged her to get Stankoski to call a cab, but Aranda could not reach Stankoski after talking to that friend. "I knew Tony's demeanor and the way he was," Aranda said. "I didn't think she was safe, personally." The next morning, Stankoski appeared uncomfortable, but told Aranda nothing happened. "She was not at all happy with the situation. She was disappointed in herself, that she had let herself get into the position she was in and had not made better judgment about going there."
• Aranda said she heard Gutierrez say inappropriate things to other women staffers, including an intern. "He was picking on her about something, but she kind of laughed and said, I'm —okay, I'm going to go back to my private place now, meaning her cubicle, that's how I took it. He said, 'Oh, don't get me started on your private places."
• She also said other women staffers felt uncomfortable around Gutierrez. "I know quite a few people on the 15th floor, the attorneys in the business counsel section...would ask me, why does he look at us like that? Does he have— what's up with him? I mean, they were uncomfortable with him, and they would ask me, you know, what—what was up with him?"
• On Oct. 10, Aranda became so fed up with the environment in the office that she complained to a colleague about Gutierrez' professionalism. "That day he had told me to shut up and not speak unless I was spoken to, and that was just what did it for me," she said. "I mean, I—I knew— I hadn't been in State government for long, but I knew enough that this was a ticking time bomb for the office. It just wasn't— I mean, I had been out smoking a cigarette with him one day, and he was joking around with me, laughing about how he had broken the law Marc's first day in office." Specifically, he was referring to drinking past serving hours on the night of the inauguration. She also said Gutierrez consistently "bragged about breaking the law. It appears as if he was running his construction business out of the State office," she said, saying he took frequent calls on his cell phone, and had an aide draw up something for his construction business.
She also expressed fear of him. "I'm scared to tell you guys this kind of stuff," she said. "I don't trust him." She also said Gutierrez traveled with a gun, and had lights and sirens put in his car. "It's not something anyone really understood."
• Kristi August, Gutierrez' secretary, said he often used profanity in the office. Before Stankoski and Vanessa Stout filed sexual harassment charges against Gutierrez, August said they were often friendly with him. Stankoski and Stout frequently played tricks on Gutierrez, including prank calling him and farting in a Tupperware container and inviting him to smell the contents, she said.
• Gutierrez professed to have no idea why Stout and Stankoski had accused him of sexual harassment. "I have no idea," he said. "I mean if you could follow, this is why I really want some of these e-mails and everything else. If all this allegedly happened in September and I was doing this and we have dinners, and you have Cindy over there planning birthday parties for me, you know, they're sending me valentine's and different things and everything else. I got—I — I'm lost." "The only thing I can figure out is that Vanessa's upset that she's not coming back to the department, and the other one's worried that she's going to be fired next, and they're looking at some type of job protection and putting me in the middle of it. "
• Gutierrez did admit to buying Stout a sex toy as a gag gift, after she told him that her boyfriend broke up her because, Gutierrez said, he was jealous of a previous toy she had. But he denied asking her to let him watch her use it.
• Dann and Gutierrez have different accounts of how Gutierrez got hired. According to Gutierrez, Dann asked him to come on board the day before Christmas. Dann, however, said he wasn't aware that his friend had applied until late January 2007 or early February.
• Gutierrez denied laying down beside Stankoski in his underwear or unbuttoning her pants. He also denied damaging a state vehicle after drinking with Stankoski one evening, as has been reported. He called Stankoski "a very vindictive person." "They(Stankoski and Stout) both wanted to stay working in the department but still wanted to say that I did things," he said. "I don't understand if you can make allegations against somebody but still want to work for them."
• During her interview, Jessica Utovich, Dann's scheduler, was asked if she wore pajamas on Sept. 10, 2007, the night Stankoski said she woke up next to Gutierrez with the buttons on her pants undone. "I honestly don't remember what I was wearing. I tend to wear either jeans or sweatpants when I'm not at work," she said. "I know I wasn't wearing pajamas, because I never wear them in public, but I - it's so long ago, I don't really remember."
• Molly Taylor, who worked in the General Services office for a time, said she had to move off of the 17th floor (and transfer) because, "I couldn't work up there anymore, the vulgarity, the sexual harassment, everything that was going on." She said she witnessed sexual harassment between Dann's Chief of Staff, Ed Simpson, and a colleague where he told her to put a coat on because her "nipples were hard." She did it. On another occasion, Simpson complimented the colleague's legs. She also said she witnessed Simpson nearly get into a fight with another staff member.
• Stankoski outlined various occasions in which Gutierrez used sexual innuendos or made inappropriate comments. One day, she said, he told a woman in the office, "You're not exposing enough....Why don't you just let them hang out."
• Stankoski also said Alyssa Lenhoff, Dann's wife, approached Stankoski and Stout around Christmas of last year and gave Stout "dirty looks." Sometime after New Year's, Stankoski said she had an uncomfortable encounter with Lenhoff in an elevator. "I stood in the corner where the buttons were and could feel her eyes on me the whole way down," she said.
• Stankoski said Gutierrez once called her into his office and handed her a brochure about a "three-day getaway" to Las Vegas. "He goes, here pick a weekend, I'll take you. And I thought, are you kidding me? He's like, yeah, pick a weekend, and, you know, I'll make sure you go. I was like, oh, my God, and I showed Doug the postcard. I said, he's trying to take me to Vegas. Doug's just like, oh, my God, what is he, does he think you're his girlfriend? I was like, I don't know."
• When Stankoski told her stories of sexual harassment to Stephanie Demers in Human Resources, the two engaged in a bit of cloak and dagger to avoid detection, in some cases meeting in the women's bathroom. "I mean, Stephanie told me that she had seen everything I described to her, she had seen Tony do those gestures, biting on his lip, staring at women's chests. She felt for me. She said, I know what you're talking about."
• Stout, who lived in the same apartment complex as Dann, Gutierrez and communications director Leo Jennings III, said she got her job because of a gallon of milk. After Gutierrez called Stout and asked her to bring over a gallon of milk, she wound up in their kitchen. Dann then offered her a job, and when she told him that she had a criminal record, Dann said Gutierrez could help her work through that, she said.
• Stout said Gutierrez would make comments like "he'd like to have sex with me and stuff like that." After she took the job, "that's when the 'you owe me' thing came in," she said. When he gave her the sex toy, she was stunned. "I'm like, what do I say to you? Do I say thank you or you're an asshole? What do I say? He's like, just say thank you." After she started working for him, she said, "He would call me into his office like, you know, when are you going to — have you used that thing yet? I'd say no, it's still in the package. He's like, you know, am I going to get to see you use it when you open it up? I'm like, that's gross."
• Stout denied she ever had sex with Gutierrez but, she says, Gutierrez told her that Dann assumed they were. "He (Dann) made the assumption that I had sex with Tony for Tony to want to get me this job," she said. Stout also suggested that Dann's affair with Utovich was the reason she was transferred from her job. She said Gutierrez told her that after Dann's wife found out about the affair, "Marc was trying to bring everybody down with him, telling his wife, well, Leo was doing it, Tony was doing it." At a holiday Christmas party, Stout said she tried to introduce herself to Dann's wife Alyssa. "That's when she give me the stare-downs," Stout said. "I went to shake her hand and she refused to shake my hand." After her transfer, Stout said she confronted Gutierrez at his apartment. She said he told her, "It makes Marc Dann sick to his stomach to see me in the State Office Tower, knowing that Tony hasn't told his wife about me and Tony having sex."
• After filing the harassment charges, Stout said staffers told her, "You need to start watching behind your back, you don't know what these men are capable of." she said. "Before that point, I didn't think of anything, but now, I walk around with mace on my keychain."
• Jennifer Urban, a charitable law attorney in the office, told investigators — somewhat reluctantly — that Leo Jennings pressured her to lie in her testimony. In a text message Urban sent to Dann on Friday, April 11, she wrote, "I will not lie like Leo wants me to. I will not risk my bar admission. I love you and Tony and Leo, but not enough to get disbarred." (Jennings said he never told Urban to lie). When investigators questioned her about the text message, Urban said, "He wanted me to play a little bit fast and loose with you, and I was not willing to do that." Urban said Jennings didn't want her to acknowledge that the two rode together one night in October to the Ocean Club restaurant. She said Jennings didn't want Espy to conclude the two were having an affair. Espy said he had no intention of asking her if they were.
• Urban, who is a close friend of Utovich's, also told investigators that Utovich was transferred from her job as Dann's scheduler because of an online blog linking her to the attorney general. "My understanding of why she got transferred was because the Right Angle Blog came out with a story, and it was either late November or early December, that she and Marc Dann were having an affair, and she needed to be transferred because of that story. And because of the allegations and Alyssa and how she was reacting to the story, she needed to be moved from the floor." Urban said he understood that to be true from her conversations with Jennings, Gutierrez, Dann and Utovich.
• Jennings said he was in Youngstown on Sept. 10, the night Stankoski was in the apartment with Utovich, Gutierrez and Dann. He heard about the allegations for the first time sometime after the first of the year, he said, after Simpson and another staffer showed him Stankoski's text messages to her friend, Mariellen Aranda. They showed them to him, he said, "because I handle the communications issues in the office, and they — you know, I'm pretty much — everything that happens in the office comes past me." He said he asked if a complaint had been filed and whether Gutierrez had been counseled about "proper conduct with his — on how to conduct himself with the people who worked underneath him."
• Marc Polster, Dann's chief information officer, talked about a culture in the office quite different from what he was used to in past jobs. He and Gutierrez did not get along, he said. "Tony was antagonistic towards me, I would say hostile. And, again, I refer back to the fact that I spent 25 years in corporate America, I'm used to a certain amount of decorum and management technique and leadership ability and leadership ways of doing things, you know. And Tony was very foreign to me, the kind of person who was throwing around his weight, trying to intimidate me. And I stood up to him. I wasn't taking any baloney. And I — when we had conflicts, I tried to be very up front and honest and spoke — you know, spoke my heart and my mind and wasn't, you know, countered into submission by him."
• Added Polster: "There was a certain amount of what I was told was Youngstown-type interplay, crude language, disrespectful ways of dealing with each other, Jessica Utovich, you know, calling Marc a — you know, you son of a bitch in front of his face, around the table, and Marc just sitting there, you know, just laughing it off. And I thought, that's kinda odd. But I adapted to it and said, well, that's the way this administration's going to be."
