A former Panda Express employee said she was pressured to remove her underwear in front of colleagues and strangers during a “trust-building” exercise, according to a civil complaint.
Jennifer Spargifiore, 23, filed the lawsuit last month in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Panda Express and Alive Seminars and Coaching Academy, a self-improvement consulting firm that led the exercise, are cited in the lawsuit as defendants.
According to the lawsuit, Spargifiore worked for Panda Express from August 10, 2016 to July 15, 2019, mainly in the Santa Clarita suburb of northern Los Angeles.
She said that Alive seminars are often “a prerequisite for promotion”, so much so that participants were required to provide their job identification numbers so that seminar fees “could be directly debited from their employee accounts. Panda Express. “
The multi-day sessions, however, were “bizarre and quickly turned into psychological abuse,” the suit said.
During a session on July 13, 2019, Spargifiore was pressured into an “’exercise’ in which she was forced to stay in her underwear under the pretext of ‘building trust’,” according to the complaint.
She “got almost naked in front of strangers and coworkers – she was extremely uncomfortable, but she pushed because she knew it was her only chance for a promotion,” the suit said. “In the meantime, the Alive Seminars team was openly looking at women in their naked state, smiling and laughing.”
Later in this exercise, Spargifiore and a male participant, also in underwear, were reportedly forced to stand in front of the group to “hug him”.
“The seminar increasingly resembled a ritual of initiation of worship over time,” said the process.
After Spargifiore left the seminar earlier, she “was constructively dismissed from her position at Panda Express in July 2019”, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, which claimed Spargifiore was a victim of sexual assault, a hostile work environment and emotional distress, did not cite a dollar amount for damages.
Panda Restaurant Group, the parent company of Panda Express in Rosemead, California, said it is conducting its own investigation of the allegations described in the lawsuit.
“We do not tolerate the type of behavior described in the process, and that worries us deeply,” according to a company statement on Wednesday. “We are committed to providing a safe environment for all members and upholding our core values to treat each person with respect.”
The company also sought to distance itself from co-defendant Alive, calling it “an outsourced organization in which Panda has no shareholding and over which it has no control”.
“The Panda Restaurant Group does not impose and does not require any member to participate in the Alive Seminars and the Coaching Academy, nor is it a requirement to win promotions,” said the company.
Alive could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. In a statement to the Orange County Register, the organization said its training sessions are presented with respect and dignity.
