Things were going well for Monica López at her new job at the Ideal Snacks factory in Liberty, located in Sullivan County midway between Poughkeepsie and the Pennsylvania border. She and her husband had relocated from a town further west that offered mostly agricultural employment. The Ideal Snacks plant—one of the largest employers in the county—offered her a better opportunity to work.

She started in March 2011, packing boxes full of chips and other snacks, along with other manual tasks like cleaning the machines. When she began, she heard co-workers complain about the behavior of the supervisors, but she was new and unfamiliar with people.

“For about three months, everything was fine,” she said, speaking in Spanish during an interview with the New York Law Journal.

Then things changed. One of the supervisors, Santiago Malaga, began frequently making inappropriate and intimate proposals to López. He would move her to more isolated parts of the plant where he made romantic demands of her. In exchange for going on dates with her, he promised he could arrange for a better position for her, higher wages and other benefits at work.

At one point, in 2013, as López bent over to clean the inside of a machine, Malaga approached her and grabbed her buttocks. When she immediately confronted him, he warned her: Do not report the incident.

“Since I didn't accept anything from him, he started to bother me,” López said. She said Malaga would physically pull her off a task to make her, verbally abusing her by ridiculing and humiliating her. None of her male co-workers were treated the same way.

“Then I believed at that point what every one else was saying about the supervisors,” López said.

These allegations are part of a recently filed lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of López and six other Latina former employees of the Ideal Snacks plant, all of whom were laid off in spring 2015. In the complaint, they recount instances of unwanted sexual harassment, verbal and physical abuse, and gender-based discrimination allegedly perpetuated by numerous supervisors, and blessed by the words and deeds of the plant manager, Marvin Cardenas.

Other workers made similar or more disturbing allegations.

Elizabeth Díaz said she worked for Ideal Snacks for nearly a decade. During that time, another manager, Andres Malaga, regularly pressed Díaz to engage in sexual banter and begin a relationship with him. He would tell her she was worthless. When she approached Cardenas about other, less-senior workers getting raises when she did not, he told her she was “useless.”

Díaz became pregnant in 2013. She requested a light duty assignment, only to be told she was worthless by Cardenas. She miscarried a week later. Cardenas would use this and other miscarriages against her when she reported injuries, claiming she was simply negligent.

Díaz and the other workers would routinely face humiliating remarks and inappropriate sexual contact from supervisors. Another plaintiff, Lidia Pérez de Pérez, said she was told by supervisor Julio Morales in April 2013 to bend over with her legs splayed while she was cleaning inside the factory's machines because he wanted to see “what was in between her legs.”

When they weren't being sexually harassed, the workers said they were being abused. Supervisors would withhold bathroom privileges indiscriminately for female workers, even as male workers went at their leisure. The women faced regular verbal abuse, being called vulgar names like “old women pigs” and far worse. The abuse also took on a physical dimension, such as when another plaintiff, Elva Mariana Reyes, was told by Cardenas that they were assigned some of the most challenging and difficult physical work at the plant so that “the women can appreciate what kind of work the men are doing and learn from them.”

Multiple attempts by phone and email to reach officials at Ideal Snacks to talk about the allegations were made and no response was forthcoming.

The suit's filing can't be entirely divorced from the current social moment. Far from a snack processing plant in a small town in New York, the #MeToo movement has seen a harsh light illuminate the toxic dynamic faced by women in the workplace. From the White House to Hollywood, stories of women forced to endure abuse and humiliation at the hands of male superiors have resulted in a social reckoning around power dynamics in the workplace.

That broader effects of this reckoning can be harder to see in areas of the economy where female employees fear repercussions that go beyond being skipped for a promotion, or even getting fired.

“The fact that there's this public awareness is not translating to the lives of low-wage immigrant workers,” said LatinoJustice PRLDEF associate counsel Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, whose group brought the suit on behalf of López and the other plaintiffs.

She said that the #MeToo moment has yet to reach people like López and the other immigrant workers, who have to be concerned not only with losing a job, but face deportation and other legal exposure.

“It isn't just an abuse of power by certain political heads or powerful men. It's how it is engrained in power relations,” she said, adding that the current political climate means many people in López's position “have to withdraw for protection.”

“You can't be connected to that larger movement,” she said.

López said that she'd seen in the news stories of famous women who faced harassment and abuse as trade-offs for achieving success.

“I mean, that has always happened,” she said. “The only difference is that this is a small town and no one really shows interest for anyone else here.”

In her situation, López said, the plant manager, Cardenas, “felt like a god” who “no one could say anything to.”

She said, “He did whatever he wanted to people. He would tell us things like, 'The police is on my side here. You do whatever I want here. I can call immigration and immigration can come take everyone away.'”

It was an example of the long-standing problem, López said, of “men that have that power and they get what they want by abusing women, us women.”

One positive of the issues being raised in this #MeToo moment is the potential for a suit like López's to be received differently than it has been, Bannan said.

What the court now considers harassment permits so much harassing behavior,” she said, adding that the growing awareness of the depth and breadth of the problem “will perhaps lend some credibility to the victims who are telling their stories and are seeking justice in our courts.

“The law has really betrayed the reality in the lives of women for a long time now, making it very hard to bring these claims,” she said.

For López, the suit represents her hopes for more respect for women in the workplace, as well as accountability for those who abuse their authority.

“Our husbands work there. We work there. We support our kids from that job. So, sometimes we're afraid of speaking up and saying what is going on,” she said. “I lived through it, I know what it feels like to not be able to speak or to have to tolerate the abuse and the mistreatment, the discrimination from the supervisors. And especially when it's coming from the highest-level manager. That's what I think I would like to happen, what I hope for this lawsuit.”

Josefa Velasquez contributed to the reporting of this story.