Hotel ordered to pay $300,000 plus after sexual assault
A national hotel chain has been ordered to pay part of $313,000 damages awarded to a young female employee who was sexually assaulted by a colleague.
The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal was told of a "serious and shocking" assault which saw the naked and much older man attacking the 21-year-old woman in December 2010.
The assault left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and depressive symptoms.
As a result, she could not return to work until 2015.
The parties cannot be named due to a non-publication order made in 2013.
The victim was sharing an employer-provided apartment with her attacker, the hotel’s night caretaker.
The tribunal heard she woke up to find him naked in her room about 5am on December 1, 2010. It found he had touched her upper thigh and groin and had tried to remove her underpants.
When she broke down crying and asked him to leave, he left the room saying something like “I’ll let you get changed”. He later returned and told her “This can be our little secret”.
Tribunal member Ann Fitzpatrick accepted the woman’s version of the incident. The attacker did not give evidence.
Ms Fitzpatrick described the assault as “serious and shocking”.
"She was a very young woman at the time, merely 21 years of age. Her assailant was nearly 70 years of age,” Ms Fitzpatrick said.
The hotel chain had been contesting the compensation claim since 2014, arguing that it was not liable for the assault and claiming the victim's evidence "lacked veracity" and she had failed to mitigate her loss.
It also denied the caretaker had acted in the course of his employment.
However, Ms Fitzpatrick found that the man had to be “available” for work at the time of the assault.
"In the terms of the legislation, it matters not if the sexual assault occurred in his private residence or anywhere else in the hotel," she found.
"The critical issue is that it occurred in the course of his work."
The hotel and the attacker will now have to fork out 313,000 within 28 days of the decision being delivered on December 6 last year.
by Leon Gettler, January 19th 2017
