A New York City woman is alleging that she was the target of a vile prank by her former boss—a retaliative move, she says, for spurning a co-worker’s sexual advances days earlier.
The prank, Shanae Johnson said, was intended to humiliate her and involved picking up dog feces from the sidewalk outside Easy Thrift Shop, the store where she worked in the city’s Brooklyn borough. Johnson told the New York Daily News that the owner of the store, Earl Dennis, recorded her on his cellphone as she picked up the feces, even as she was overcome with nausea and tears.
Johnson says that Dennis then picked up the feces and, holding it close to her face, told her it was fake.
Real or not, Johnson has had enough of Dennis’ shit. As the Daily News reports, she filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights against both Easy Thrift Store and Dennis. In the claim, she says the prank was retaliation for shutting down another male co-worker’s advances a few days earlier.
Johnson detailed to the newspaper what happened, claiming that the co-worker, whom she identified as Joe, remarked on how good she smelled and came up “unreasonably close” to Johnson to sniff her.
From the Daily News:
“How old are you? Just asking to see if I am not too old for you,” Joe allegedly said, according to the paperwork.
“I am 26 and have been married for six years. Please stop,” Johnson says she responded.
Joe turned angry and ordered her to clean a toilet the next day, Nov. 25, something not previously part of her clerk job and that he knew would disgust her, Johnson claims.
The store owner, Dennis, denies that anything inappropriate ever took place and claims that Johnson wasn’t even an employee of his store, just a volunteer.
“It didn’t happen,” Dennis told the Daily News. “We’re good people. We don’t do anything bad.”
Johnson, however, maintains that she’s still traumatized from what happened at the store, where she no longer works.
“I don’t know why he’d want to do a prank like that, while recording it on his phone. What kind of human being does something like that?” Johnson said. “It was so humiliating. If I could erase it from my memory, I would do that.”
Read more at the New York Daily News.