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Molnar v. Booth

A school district could be held liable for a junior high school principal's sexual harassment of an art teacher intern, since the evidence showed that the principal took tangible employment action against the intern for rejecting his advances; district could also be held liable because it had no policy against sexual harassment.

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The full case caption appears at the end of this opinion.

Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judge. This appeal comes to us from a jury’s verdict in favor of plaintiff Lisetta Molnar on her sexual harassment claims against the East Chicago Community School Corporation (East Chicago) and Lloyd Booth, the principal of the junior high school where she taught. She based these claims on both Title VII and 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983. In addition to modest awards of $500 each on the two theories, the jury awarded $25,000 in punitive damages against Booth and the court added $65,760 in attorneys’ fees against both defendants. The defendants’ appeals are based principally on the district court’s denial of their motions for judgment as a matter of law under Fed. R. Civ. P. 50, though they also complain about other aspects of the trial, the fees, and (in Booth’s case) the punitive damages. Molnar cross-appealed from the court’s decision to grant judgment as a matter of law on part of her sexual harassment claim. Finding no reversible error in any of the court’s decisions, even taking into account the changed landscape for sexual harassment claims after the Supreme Court’s decisions in Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 (1998), and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998), we affirm.

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