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Welcome to another episode of the Employee Survival Guide, produced by Employment Attorney Mark Carey.

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It is it's great to be here for this one.

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Yeah. So I want you to think about a scenario for a second. Have you ever been like lying in bed, it's late at night, and you're just mindlessly scrolling on your phone?

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Oh, absolutely, the doom

Doomscrolling Meets Employment Law

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scroll.

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Right, exactly. But then you decide to go down this internet rabbit hole regarding a coworker.

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Uh-oh. That is a dangerous game.

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Aaron Powell It really is. You start with a simple Google search, maybe you check their Instagram, and then suddenly you stumble onto something just absolutely scandalous.

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Aaron Ross Powell Something that totally breaks your brain.

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Yes. Something so wildly out of step with their, you know, their professional persona that it makes you look at them completely differently the next day when you're both just standing there in the break room waiting for the coffee machine.

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Aaron Powell It is a distinctly modern temptation, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, we live in this era where the sheer accessibility of everyone's private lives is just unprecedented.

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Aaron Powell It really is.

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Aaron Powell With a few keystrokes, you can uncover these digital footprints that, you know, a generation ago, they would have remained completely hidden.

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Aaron Powell Exactly. And today we are taking a huge stack of court documents and breaking down this really alarming modern workplace trend where that exact temptation just crashes head-on into employment law.

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Aaron Powell And it is a messy crash.

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Messy. We're looking at this wild 2026 case out of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. It's Gertrude Crisp versus Cioto Ambulance District. And it basically answers a question I think we've all wondered.

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Which is what happens when you find out your coworkers' darkest internet secrets and actually bring them into the office.

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Aaron Ross Powell Right. And this isn't just like an isolated, quirky legal story. Mark Carey specifically wanted to publish this case because it represents this massive growing liability in the American workplace right now.

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Yeah, it's a trend that is catching a lot of employees and frankly employers completely off guard.

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Because employees are actively seeking out their coworkers' profiles on pornographic or adult websites.

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Which is just wild to think about doing during your nine to five.

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I know. We are talking about places like OnlyFans or in the specific facts of the case we're looking at today, a platform called FetLife. Right. And the crucial detail here is that these employees aren't just looking at these profiles in the privacy of their own homes. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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No, they are taking that information, downloading those images and bringing them right into the physical or digital workplace. Aaron Powell Yeah.

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And they're using them as a weapon. They are trying to get those specific coworkers fired.

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And that weaponization is really the crux of the whole issue. I mean, people feel this sense of moral outrage, or maybe they have this desire for workplace justice, and they think, well, exposing this secret digital life is the way to achieve it.

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Right. Like they're playing vigilante.

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Exactly. But what the CRISP decision fundamentally establishes is this ultimate immovable baseline for employment law.

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And this thesis is going to blow people's minds, especially when we get into like the actual facts of who did what to whom in this specific case.

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Oh, the facts are unbelievable.

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So here is the core proposition of the CRISP decision. Bringing sexually provocative photos and images into the workplace is illegal.

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Period.

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Period. No matter who does it, no matter how public the photos were on the internet, and no matter how justified you think your reasons are.

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That is the unforgiving legal reality that this case cements. It does not matter if the person in the photos

The Bright Line On Explicit Images

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is a saint or if they are the most toxic, abusive person in your office. Right. The physical act of introducing that sexually explicit material into the professional environment, it crosses a bright, definitive line that the law simply will not tolerate.

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Which brings us to Mark Carey's ultimate takeaway for you, the listener. And you know, I'm going to say this jokingly, but it is also the most serious legal advice you might hear all day.

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Let's hear it.

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Don't get fired for being stupid.

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It's blunt, but it's very accurate.

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Aaron Powell But you know, to truly understand how this happens, how a literal victim of severe documented sexual harassment ended up being the one legally fired for misconduct.

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Aaron Powell While her harasser kept his job, by the way.

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Aaron Powell Yes. Which is exactly what happened to Gertrude Crisp we can't just look at the end of the story.

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No, we have to understand the psychological pressure cooker that led to that moment.

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Aaron Powell We have to start at the very beginning in an environment that the plaintiff herself described on the official court record as an insane asylum.

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Aaron Powell And honestly, insane asylum is a chillingly fitting description for what we're about to explore.

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Oh, completely.

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Because you don't just like wake up one day and decide to distribute pornography at work. To understand the psychological trap that Gertrude Crisp fell into, we really have to look at the chronological origin of this entire disaster.

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Aaron Powell, which starts years before the actual firing. So let's set the stage. The year is 2012.

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Right.

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We have our two main players in this legal drama. First, we have Gertrude Crisp, who is an emergency medical technician in EMT. And we have Joshua Gullet, who is also an EMT. They are working together at the Portsmouth Ambulance Department in Ohio. And according to the court

The 2012 Harassment Origin Story

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documents, this is the origin point. This is where the harassment begins.

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And as we go through these facts, we need to be very, very clear about the nature of these allegations.

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Yeah.

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The court record paints a picture of an environment that wasn't just, you know, slightly unprofessional, it was incredibly relentlessly hostile.

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It was a nightmare.

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Crisp alleged that almost from the beginning, Gullet was constantly hitting on her and making highly inappropriate sexually charged comments.

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The specifics listed in the legal filings are just incredibly graphic. We are talking about a daily barrage.

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The constant barrage, yeah.

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He allegedly would constantly comment about her breasts and her butt, and he wouldn't just hint at it. He would outright ask to see them.

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Which is just beyond inappropriate.

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And he would jokingly touch her, making physical contact, even after she explicitly and repeatedly told him no.

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And there's this one detail from the record that really illustrates how bad the environment was.

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The ambulance thing.

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Yes. When Chris would just be trying to do her job, right? Like trying to maneuver around the tight confines of the ambulance or the station.

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Aaron Ross Powell Which, as an EMT, that's literally the whole job.

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Aaron Ross Powell Right. Gullet would make remarks about how her breasts were in the way because of their size.

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That makes my skin crawl.

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Aaron Ross Powell It's a classic tactic of harassment. Taking a totally neutral professional action, like moving past someone in a hallway and sexualizing it to assert dominance.

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Aaron Powell Just trying to make the victim hyperaware of their body all the time.

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Exactly. But what's fascinating and deeply troubling here is how this behavior wasn't just targeted at Crisp.

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No, it wasn't.

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It was systemic to Gullit's entire presence in that workplace.

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I mean, he was a walking HR violation.

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He really was. If we broaden the lens beyond just Crisp, the alleged toxic culture he created affected everyone around him.

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Yeah.

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He didn't just harass one person. He allegedly made obscene comments to literally any female at the department who gave him even a moment of attention.

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He was just broadcasting this stuff to anyone in earshot. I mean, he bragged openly about having sex in the shower.

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Yep.

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He bragged about getting his wife's baby cousin pregnant. Which is just I mean, who says that at work?

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Nobody with any sense of boundaries.

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And there was even a suspicion, a widely known stationwide rumor, that he had a sexual encounter with a different co-worker in the back of an active ambulance. Wow. And according to the documents, that specific rumor allegedly led to violent physical confrontations at the workplace with Gullet's wife, who eventually worked in the same industry.

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It is the textbook definition of a toxic, sexually charged workplace. It's the exact kind of environment that federal employment laws, specifically Title VII, were explicitly designed to clean up.

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Right. Which brings me to a massive question. I think anyone listening is wondering this.

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Okay.

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If he is doing all of this right, the non-consensual touching, the relentless comments, the outright bragging about incredibly inappropriate borderline illegal things, how on earth is this guy still employed? And more importantly, for our plaintiff, why didn't Gertrude Crisp just sue him or the company right then and there in 2012?

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That is the million-dollar question, isn't it? And it highlights a massive gap between what the law says on paper and how human beings actually behave in reality.

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Okay, unpack that for me.

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When the court reviewed this case years later, they specifically noted that back in 2012, Crisp pursued absolutely no legal redress. She didn't file a formal lawsuit. She didn't file a charge with the government.

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And from the outside, looking back, it seems so obvious, you know, you are being harassed, you report it, you sue. Why wouldn't she do that?

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Because in the moment when you are in the thick of a toxic environment, employees often just want to survive their shift.

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It's true. Just put your head down.

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Exactly. They want to put their head down, do their job, and get a paycheck. The prospect of starting a massive legal battle, potentially losing your job, and facing retaliation is terrifying.

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It's exhausting just thinking about it, but the law doesn't really account for that human fear, does it?

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It really doesn't. And this is where we have to talk about the mechanics of the law. Specifically, the concept of the statute of limitations and the burden of action.

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Right.

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The legal system is not an all-knowing, omniscient entity. The law does not automatically know a workplace is toxic just because bad things are happening.

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It needs someone to ring the alarm bell.

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Exactly. The mechanism of justice requires a trigger, and the burden of pulling that trigger is entirely on the employee.

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So how does that trigger actually work in a situation like this?

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Well, legally, if you are facing this kind of harassment, you have a very strict ticking clock. You can't just go straight to federal court.

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Okay.

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You first have to formally report the behavior to your employer's HR department to give them a chance to fix it.

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And if they don't.

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If they don't, you have to file a formal complaint with the EEOC. That's the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And in most states, you only have 180 days, or sometimes 300 days, from the date the harassment occurred to file that charge.

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Aaron Ross Powell That is a very tight window when you're dealing with active trauma.

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It is extremely tight.

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Yeah.

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And the underlying logic, the why behind this strict rule, is that the law values fresh evidence.

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Okay, that makes sense.

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The courts believe that if you wait five or ten years to complain, memories fade, witnesses move away, and it becomes fundamentally unfair to try and litigate the truth. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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Right. The evidence goes stale.

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Therefore, the law demands timely action. You cannot simply file the trauma away in your mind, try to ignore it, and expect the legal system to act on it a decade later.

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Wow.

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If you miss that EEOC window, your legal right to sue over that specific past behavior essentially evaporates.

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So by doing nothing in 2012, she was unintentionally letting the legal clot run out on holding him accountable for all that Portsmouth harassment. Exactly. But you know, while she didn't file a lawsuit, she did file something else away. She sure did. Not a legal document, but a mental note. Because during this deeply toxic time at Portsmouth, another coworker actually showed Crisp some naked photos of Joshua Gullett.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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This is the seed that gets planted in her mind.

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And these weren't just random photos. These supposedly came from a public profile that Gullett and his wife had created on an adult website called FetLife. Right. So Crisp sees these photos in 2012. She knows they exist, but she just files the FetLife story away in her memory.

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She doesn't do anything with it.

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Right. She doesn't bring it up to HR. It just sits there dormant like a ticking time bomb.

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And the fact that she just absorbed that information and held onto it is completely understandable human behavior.

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Oh, for sure.

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When you are powerless in a situation, gathering dirt on your abuser can feel like a microscopic form of self-defense, even if you never use it.

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It gives you a little bit of power back.

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Exactly. But legally, as we will see, it sets a devastating precedent for her future.

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Aaron Powell Which brings us out of the Portsmouth days. The company eventually changes, the years go by, and we jump forward to 2018. But as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Aaron Powell Yes, unfortunately. The landscape has changed geographically, but not personally. Right. Both Crisp and Gullet have moved on from the Portsmouth Ambulance Department. But in a bizarre twist of fate, or perhaps just the reality of a specialized localized industry like EMS, they are both now working for a new employer. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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The Soyoto Ambulance District. Exactly. It's like a bad sequel that you are forced to watch. It's December 2018. They are both employed at Soyoto and they get scheduled on a shared shift together.

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Aaron Powell And this is where the dynamic goes from verbally toxic and uncomfortable to shockingly violently physical.

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So walk us through what happens on this shift in 2018.

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Aaron Powell Well, the altercation that occurs on this specific shift is deeply disturbing, and it's the catalyst for everything that follows.

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Okay.

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According to Crisp's testimony, Gullet started the shift falling right back into his old comfortable habits from 2012, making inappropriate comments about her body.

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Aaron Powell Just picking up right where he left off.

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Right. But then the aggression escalated dramatically.

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So think about the physical environment of an EMS station for a minute. There is a lot of downtime waiting for a 911 call. Right. Employees are often resting, so crisp is sitting in a recliner, you know, those big comfortable chairs they have in the break areas. Gullet approaches her and physically tips the recliner over while she is in it.

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Which is incredibly dangerous.

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It's assault. He then tries to physically stuff her into a trash can. Let that sink in for a second.

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She's horrifying.

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He is physically manhandling his coworker, attempting to forcefully shove her into a garbage receptacle. She manages to fight him off, gets back to the recliner, and he tips it over a second time.

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At this point, the physical boundary has been completely obliterated.

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Of course she does.

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She yells at him to stop, using heavy expletives, demanding he back off and leave her alone.

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And how does he respond to that?

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Gullet's alleged response to her demanding he stop is absolutely chilling.

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It really is. While she is flat on her back, having just been dumped out of a heavy chair for the second time, he stands over her. He tells her that they are completely alone in the station. He tells her that nobody is there to hear her scream. It's just and then he reaches

Why Silence Breaks Legal Claims

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down and touches her breasts.

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That goes far beyond a hostile work environment. That crosses multiple lines into criminal assault and battery.

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It's not just a bad workplace, it's a crime scene.

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Exactly. The psychological terror of being told no one can hear you scream by a coworker who was physically assaulting you cannot be overstated.

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So later that night, after surviving that shift, Crisp finally does what the law and HR manuals say you are supposed to do.

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Right. She finally speaks up.

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She doesn't stay silent this time. She goes to her supervisor at Soyoto, a woman named Tracy Mullins. She reports the entire incident the tipping of the chair, the trash can, the threat about screaming, the groping.

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She lays it all out.

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And interestingly, she also mentions the FETLife profile from 2012 to the supervisor, offering it as proof of his fundamentally perverse character.

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And we have to look incredibly closely at the employer's response to this report.

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Yes, because this is maddening.

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Because this is where the institutional failure of the Sayoto Ambulance District begins. And it's this failure that creates the vacuum of justice. Chris eventually tries to fill herself.

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Right, because if an employee comes to you and says, My coworker physically attacked me, groped me, and told me no one could hear me scream, you would expect the HR department to bring down the hammer.

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You would expect an immediate response.

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You would expect immediate suspension pending an investigation and likely termination.

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You would expect that, because that is what a functioning legal and HR apparatus does. But Cioto's response was astoundingly inadequate.

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It's a joke.

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Their solution to a report of physical and sexual assault was simply to separate their schedules.

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That's it.

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That's it. They essentially promised Crisp that she and Gullet would never be scheduled to work a shift together again. And that was it.

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It's infuriating. That is not a solution. He faced zero other repercussions.

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None.

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No suspension, no termination, no mandate for sexual harassment, training, or counseling, just a logistical tweak on a spreadsheet. Okay, we'll keep you two apart.

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From an employer liability standpoint, it is a dangerously weak response.

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Yeah.

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But we had to analyze the psychological impact this has on Chris.

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Yeah, how does she react to that?

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The court specifically noted her deep, profound frustration following this non-response. She believed, based on the supervisor's actions, that the scheduling decision was the final, absolute ruling from management.

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And you can completely understand why she'd feel that way. If management hears a credible allegation of physical assault and their only reaction is to change a schedule, the message they are sending to the victim is crystal clear.

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We don't care.

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Exactly. We do not care about your safety, and we are not going to punish him.

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This creates a phenomenon known as institutional betrayal.

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Institutional betrayal, I like that phrase.

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When the institution that is supposed to protect you fails to do so, it breeds a unique kind of hopelessness. Crisp testified that she felt any further complaints to management about Gullet would be entirely futile.

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Why bother reporting him again if the first incredibly severe report did nothing, right?

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Precisely.

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So she it is trapped. She still has to work at the same company as her abuser, even if they aren't on the same shift. And while they're physically separated on the schedule, the resentment inside her just simmers and grows.

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Just builds up.

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And because formal channels failed her, she begins engaging in her own form of informal social retaliation.

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Which is a highly common human response to a lack of formal justice. If the company won't punish him, she will try to punish his reputation. Right. She starts labeling Gullet a schieve, a pervert, and a predator to anyone at the station who would listen.

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She's trying to warn people.

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She is trying to warn people, yes, but she is also trying to exact a social cost that the employer refused to levy.

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And just to prove to the listener how completely unrehabilitated Gullett is, despite the schedule change, we have another incident.

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Oh, this part is wild.

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Two years after this trash can assault, two years of them supposedly being separated, and him knowing she reported him, Gullett actually reaches out to Crisp via Facebook and tries to convince her to have sex with him. It's just I have no words.

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It demonstrates a staggering level of audacity and a complete lack of fear regarding workplace consequences.

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Seriously.

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Crisp, of course, declined the proposition, and the matter was dropped online. But if we connect this Facebook message to the bigger picture of her psychological state, it's throwing gasoline on a fire.

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It absolutely did. She is carrying all this anger from 2012, the trauma of the 2018 assault, the knowledge of his ongoing predatory mindset from the Facebook message, and she sees him just coasting along in his job with zero consequences.

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The simmering resentment, this justifiable anger over the fact that a predator faced no real punishment set a massive psychological trap for Crisp.

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It pushed her to the edge.

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The employer's failure to act didn't just leave her unprotected. It actively incentivized her to take matters into her own hands.

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And that desperation for justice leads directly to the critical mistake that ultimately cost her her career. We're jumping forward again in the timeline. Right. It's now around 2022. Crisp has been carrying this burden for a decade since the Portsmouth days and four years since the trash can incident.

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Crisp is at the Soyota workplace on duty. And she is having a meeting with two brand new EMTs who have recently been hired.

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Sandra Thacker and Marissa Campbell.

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Right.

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And you can picture this scene. Crisp takes it upon herself to act as the veteran, warning the rookies. She wants to give them the real scoop on what working there is like. She's talking to them about what she broadly calls EMS culture. She's explicitly warning these two new women that there are perverted, predatory men working in this specific field and likely at this specific company.

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Which, given her extensive and traumatic history, is a highly understandable, even noble impulse. It is. She sees new, vulnerable employees and she wants to protect them from the exact trauma she experienced. She is trying to be the shield that her employer refused to be.

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But this is where it all goes wrong.

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Here is the fatal error. The mechanism of how she chose to warn them is where she crosses the legal line.

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Right.

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She didn't just tell stories about her experiences. She didn't just say, hey, watch out for Josh Gullett. He's bad news. Stay away from him.

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No, she decided she needed to prove it. She pulled out receipts.

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The worst kind of receipts.

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While on duty, actively on the clock and on company property, Gertrude Crisp pulls out nude images of Joshua Gullett and his wife.

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And where did she get these? Remember the seed planted back in 2012?

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The FetLife profile.

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Exactly. These were the images allegedly taken from their public FetLife profiles. The information she filed away in her memory a decade ago, back at Portsmouth, has now been retrieved and weaponized.

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Let's talk about those photos because it makes the situation so much worse. The court notes that these FetLife profiles supposedly advertised a desire for extramarital sexual relationships.

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They included highly sexually charged language.

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And the photos depicted Gullett engaged in explicit sexual acts by himself and with his wife.

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And here is the complication that makes Crisp's actions legally indefensible.

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This part is so messy.

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Gullett's wife was not some random third party on the internet. By this point in 2022, Gullett's wife was also an EMT working at Cioto.

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Which is an incredibly messy, vital detail. So Crisp isn't just showing nudes of her harasser to try and prove he's a creep, she is showing nudes of another. Co-worker, the harasser's wife, to these new employees.

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The psychological leap Crisp took in this moment is staggering. In a matter of seconds, she completely transformed her role in the workplace ecosystem.

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She really did.

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She went from being a victim of severe harassment, who was trying to verbally warn and protect her colleagues, to becoming an active participant in distributing workplace pornography.

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It's a colossal lapse in judgment. You can see the twisted logic of it, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Sort of. Yeah.

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She's thinking, management won't believe me, maybe these girls won't believe me, so I'm going to show them the undeniable proof that this guy is exactly the freak I say he is.

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You can absolutely see the human logic, but the law does not care about your personal justification for breaking a foundational workplace rule. Right. And this connects directly back to the core thesis of our discussion today. And the exact reason Mark Carey is sounding the alarm on this case, we are seeing this trend explode across the country.

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The weaponization of the digital footprint.

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Precisely. Employees are discovering a coworker's outside work sexual life, whether that's finding their FET life, stumbling onto their OnlyFans, or uncovering a secret Twitter account, and they are bringing it inside the physical or remote workplace.

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And they think it's okay.

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They think that because it's true, or because it's public on the internet, they have a right to expose it at work.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

But put yourself in the shoes of Sandra and Marissa, these two new EMTs. I want you to really imagine this. Okay. You just got hired at a new company, you're nervous, you're learning the ropes, trying to figure out where the bathrooms are. A veteran coworker sits you down to give you some advice, and suddenly, without warning, she shoves naked pictures the two of your other coworkers in your face.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

It is wildly inappropriate. It creates an immediate severe level of discomfort and hostility for those new hires.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Yeah, nobody wants that.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

They didn't ask to see their coworkers naked, which leads directly to the employer's perspective and the inevitable fallout.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Because there's always fallout.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Because you cannot introduce that kind of explicit material into a professional environment without it eventually getting back to management. Whether the new employees complain directly or word just spread around the station, management found out.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

So Skyoto Management hears about this and they initiate a formal investigation. The investigation is spearheaded by a board member named Eric Lutz. Right. And unlike the trash can incident, where management basically shrugged, Lutz comes down hard on Crisp.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

Lutz's findings were very clear, and we have to acknowledge that from a pure HR and legal standpoint regarding company policy, his conclusions were sound.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

He investigated the incident and stated unequivocally that showing those explicit pictures was absolutely not necessary to warn anyone about Gullit's past behavior.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

I mean, you can use your words to warn someone, you don't need visual aids.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Exactly. Yeah.

The 2018 Assault And Weak Response

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Lutz found that showing those photographs made everyone in the workplace who heard about it deeply uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Of course it did.

SPEAKER_02 25:16

In his official findings, he characterized Crisp's action of distributing the photos as way over the top.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Seattle essentially drew a line in the sand. They said, look, we expect exemplary behavior from every employee while they're on duty and representing this district. And based on Lutz's investigation, the board of the Seyo Ambulance District unanimously agreed to fire Gertrude Crisp. Let me repeat that so the gravity of it sinks in.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Please do.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

They fired the victim of severe sexual harassment for the specific offense of showing nude pictures of an employee to other employees while on duty and on company property.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Which brings us to the massive legal showdown. Because Crisp did not just pack up her locker and walk away.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Right. Because here's where it gets really interesting from a legal perspective. Think about the optics of this situation.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

The icons are terrible.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

She was the one who was physically tipped out of a chair. She was the one who was groped. She was the one who was threatened. Yes. How is the employer legally allowed to fire the victim of sexual assault while the alleged harasser, the guy who started all of this, keeps his job. It feels completely upside down. It feels like a total miscarriage of justice.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

It does feel deeply unfair on a human, emotional level. It feels retaliatory. And that is exactly the legal theory Crisp used to sue them. She filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of Ohio, claiming that her firing was unlawful retaliation under both federal law, specifically Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and state law under the Ohio revised code.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Okay, let's slow down and really explain this because retaliation is a word people throw around a lot at work, but it has a very specific legal meaning.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

It does.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

What exactly is a retaliatory firing in the eyes of federal employment law?

SPEAKER_02 27:00

The underlying theory of Title VII retaliation is actually a protective mechanism for employees.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

The law recognizes that if it's illegal for a company to discriminate against you based on your sex, race, religion, et cetera, then the company must also be prohibited from punishing you for complaining about that discrimination.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Because if they could fire you for complaining, no one would ever complain and the discrimination laws would be useless.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Precisely. Under Title VII, sexual harassment is legally classified as a form of sex discrimination. Therefore, if you complain to your employer that you are being sexually harassed, you are engaging in what the law calls a protected activity. Protected activity. The statute strictly forbids an employer from firing you, demoting you, or materially punishing you in retaliation for engaging in that protected activity.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

So applying that to Crisp, her legal argument was essentially I was having a conversation where I was warning these new girls about a known sexual predator in our workplace. That warning is me opposing sexual harassment. That is a protected activity. And you fired me for having that conversation. Therefore, my firing is a legal retaliation.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

That was the exact framing her lawyers used.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

It sounds like a solid argument.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

But this is where the law draws a very sharp, unforgiving line between making a protected complaint of harassment and committing a firable offense while making that complaint.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Ah, I see.

SPEAKER_02 28:22

And to understand how the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled against her, we have to look under the hood at the specific legal framework they apply to the evidence.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Aaron Powell Right, because when a case goes to federal court, the judge doesn't just look at the story, go with their gut feeling on who is the bad guy, and bang a gavel.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

No, they definitely don't do it.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

They have to run the facts through a very specific, rigid legal test.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

Exactly. And in cases of retaliation where there isn't direct evidence, courts use something called the McDonnell Douglas framework.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Let's explain what we mean by direct evidence. Direct evidence would be if Eric Lutz sent an email to the board saying, Gertrude Crisp keeps complaining about Josh Gullett sexually harassing her, and it's annoying me, so I'm firing her to shut her up.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

That's a smoking gun.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Correct. That is direct evidence. But employers are rarely that foolish. There is almost never a smoking gun email.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

The real reason for a firing is usually hidden or disputed. So the court has to rely on circumstantial evidence. And the McDonnell Douglas framework is the tool they use to evaluate that circumstantial evidence. I like to think of the McDonnell Douglas framework like a highly structured tennis match between the employee and the employer, where the ball they are hitting back and forth is the burden of proof.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

That's a great analogy.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

Let's walk through how this match is played.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

To even get on the court and start the match, the employee has to serve the ball first. Legally, this means Crisp had to prove what is called a prima facie case.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Prima facie.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Essentially, the bare minimum foundational facts required to make a judge say, okay, this looks suspicious enough to warrant a trial.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

And what are the four requirements to hit that successful serve?

SPEAKER_02 30:06

Crisp had to prove four things. First, she engaged in a protected activity.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Okay, one.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Second, the employer knew about that protected activity. Third, she suffered an adverse employment action, meaning she was fired. Got it. And fourth, there was a causal connection between the protected activity and the firing, meaning the firing wouldn't have happened but for her engaging in the protected activity.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Okay, let's look at her serve. She was definitely fired, so prong three is met. The employer knew about the meeting, so prong two is met. She claimed the firing was because of the meeting, attempting prong four. But the absolute sticking point here, the reason her serve hit the net is that first prong. Was her action actually a protected activity, was pulling out the FETLife photos legally protected.

SPEAKER_02 30:51

And this is where Judge John K. Bush, writing the opinion for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, drew a very hard, definitive line.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

What did he say?

SPEAKER_02 31:00

The court analyzed her actions and concluded that while speaking about harassment is protected, distributing pornography is not.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

I will quote Judge Bush directly, because the language is vital. He wrote, Title VII does not protect an employee where, as here, the employee has needlessly and gratuitously shared nude and possibly sexually explicit images of co-workers.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Needlessly and gratuitously. Those are powerful condemning words from a federal judge.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

They are. The court is establishing a boundary regarding how you were allowed to protest harassment. They are saying that just because you have a valid underlying complaint about a hostile work environment, you do not get a blank check to behave however you want in response.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

It's not a free pass.

SPEAKER_02 31:41

Exactly. Your status as a victim does not immunize you from the consequences of violating other core workplace policies.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

So under this ruling, it sounds like showing nudes at work is always an automatic firing offense.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

Usually, yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

But wait, is it ever legal to show explicit photos at work? Because the court didn't just shut the door completely, they actually carved out a tiny, highly specific exception in the ruling, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:06

They did. Good catch. In what legal scholars and attorneys will refer to as Footnote 4 of this decision, the court noted that they were not establishing an absolute 100% ban on explicit images in every conceivable context.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Okay, so what's the exception?

SPEAKER_02 32:22

They acknowledge there might be a specific scenario where Title VII does protect an employee who shows explicit images to someone at work.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Okay, let's explain this exception. What is the scenario where you don't get fired?

SPEAKER_02 32:33

The court proposed a hypothetical. Imagine an employee is sitting at their desk and they suddenly receive an unsolicited nude photograph from a coworker via text message.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Just pops up on their phone.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

Right, just pops up. In that specific narrow scenario, the law would almost certainly protect the recipient's right to take their phone, walk directly into the human resources office, and show the HR manager the explicit image to substantiate a formal claim of sexual harassment.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

That makes total sense to me. In that scenario, the photo itself is the weapon being used against you.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

You are providing direct, immediate evidence of a policy violation being committed against you in real time to the proper authorities.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Exactly. You are a passive recipient of the harassment, utilizing the proper institutional channels to report it. But if we compare that hypothetical to what Crisp did, we see a fundamental structural difference.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

It's completely different. Crisp didn't receive these images unsolicited on her phone in 2022. She actively sought them out or recalled

The Photos That Triggered Termination

SPEAKER_00 33:36

them from a third-party public website she viewed a decade prior. Right. And critically, she didn't take them to the HR manager to file a formal complaint. She whipped them out and showed them to her rank and file colleagues while on the clock in the middle of an EMS station.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

She was not passively reporting a current crime. She was actively distributing explicit material to make a point.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Let's use an analogy. Imagine someone breaks into your house and steals your television. Okay. You are clearly a victim of a crime, but instead of calling the police to report the robbery, you wait four years. You figure out where the robber lives, and you decide to break into his house in the middle of the night to steal your television back.

SPEAKER_02 34:19

And in the process of breaking into his house, you also decide to steal his wife's television, just to make a point.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Yes. Exactly. When the cops catch you walking out of his house with two TVs, you can't say, but wait, he robbed me first four years ago. I'm the real victim.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

The cops aren't gonna care.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

The police are gonna say, that's terrible. But you are currently committing burglary, you are still committing a crime, even if you were wronged first. The original injustice committed against you does not magically legalize your subsequent bad behavior.

SPEAKER_02 34:49

That analogy perfectly illustrates the mechanical reality of employment law, specifically what courts call the mixed motive doctrine, which the Sixth Circuit relied on heavily here.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

The mixed motive doctrine.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

Right. If we connect the facts of the Crisp case to the bigger picture of legal precedent, the court actually acknowledged that parts of Crisp's meeting with the new EMTs were perfectly legal and protected.

SPEAKER_00 35:13

So she was partially right.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

Yes. Her verbal warnings to Thacker and Campbell, the part where she used her words to tell them that EMS culture can be toxic, and warning them to watch out for predatory men that speech was protected activity.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:27

She cannot be fired for that.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

But the nudes ruin the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Precisely. The court relied on major established precedents, specifically a case called Gogol v. Kia Motors. The Kia Motors precedent established a vital rule. An employee cannot use their protected conduct in this case, talking about harassment as an impenetrable shield to hide their unprotected, firable conduct, distributing pornography at work.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

The law isn't a magical force field. Right. You can't say, well, I was mid-sentence talking about sexual harassment when I showed the nudes, so the whole interaction is protected and you can't fire me. The unprotected act taints the protected speech.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Exactly. The employer is legally allowed to sever the two actions. Skaido is allowed to say, We aren't firing you for warning the new employees. We are firing you specifically for the act of showing them naked pictures while you did it.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

That distinction makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

But Crisp's legal team refused to accept this. They tried to fight this conclusion by pivoting their argument.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

What did they do?

SPEAKER_02 36:26

They tried to justify showing the photos by leaning heavily on the source of the images.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Right. Which brings us to a really fascinating debate about the boundary of the modern workplace.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 36:37

Crisp's lawyers argued, essentially, but the Gullets posted these photos publicly. They put them on FetLife for the whole internet to see. If they willingly put it out there in the public domain, why is it a firable offense for me to pull it up and show it at work? It's not private anymore.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

It's a defense we hear all the time now in employment disputes. It's the battle cry of the internet age. It's on their public Instagram, it's on their public TikTok. I just showed people what they already posted themselves.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

It feels logical to a layperson. I mean, if you post it, you own the consequences.

SPEAKER_02 37:10

It's a common, intuitive defense, but the court completely dismantled it.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Really?

SPEAKER_02 37:14

The Sixth Circuit's rebuttal to this public domain argument was definitive and it sets a massive precedent. They ruled, and I love the elegance of this phrase, in the workplace, the law requires that some things be left unseen.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Some things be left unseen. That is brilliant phrasing. It's so clear, and it really defines the concept of a professional boundary.

SPEAKER_02 37:35

It establishes a vital legal distinction between public digital life and professional workplace boundaries.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Just because someone has an OnlyFans account or a FETLife account or a highly explicit Twitter feed, and just because anyone with an internet connection could find it does not mean their co-workers have to be subjected to it while they're on the clock.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

No, of course not.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

The employer has a legal duty and a legal right to maintain a professional environment free from explicit material.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Because the workplace is an involuntary environment. You have to be there to earn a living. You shouldn't be forced to consume your coworkers' weekend internet activities just because you share a break room.

SPEAKER_02 38:13

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

And we have to circle back to the wife in this context because the court really highlighted how completely unjustified it was for Crisp to show nude images of Gullet's wife to the new EMTs.

SPEAKER_02 38:25

It was a massive unforced error.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

The wife had absolutely nothing to do with the harassment Crisp suffered in 2012 or the trash can incident in 2018. Crisp wasn't warning the new employees that the wife was a predator.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

No, she wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 38:39

She was just reponizing collateral damage to maximize the shock value of her presentation.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Which demonstrates to the court the gratuitous nature of the act we discussed earlier. It wasn't about self-defense or legitimately warning colleagues at that point. It was about public shaming and character assassination.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

Yeah, that's what it turned into.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

And unfortunately for Crisp, as we analyze the entirety of this case, her litigation strategy in court was as flawed as her workplace strategy of showing the photos.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

What do you mean? We've talked about how her actions got her fired, but did her lawyers actually mess up the lawsuit itself?

SPEAKER_02 39:14

They did from a strategic mechanical standpoint. When you read the appellate decision, the court subtly points out two massive legal missteps that Crisp and her legal team made.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

Missteps, which essentially guaranteed her loss. First, when she initially filed the lawsuit, she included a hostile work environment claim regarding Joshua Gullett's behavior.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

Which seems like the exact right claim to file. The man tipped her out of a chair and tried to put her in a trash can while groping her. That is the definition of a hostile work environment.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

It absolutely was. That claim might have been her best and perhaps only avenue for a legal remedy regarding how she was horribly treated by him.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

But for whatever reason, during the summary judgment phase of the trial, she dropped that claim. She completely abandoned it.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Hold on, let me explain summary judgment for the listener, because it's a crucial phase where most employment lawsuits die.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Good idea.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Summary judgment is essentially when the employer goes to the judge before trial even starts and says, Judge, even if we assume every single fact the plaintiff is alleging is 100% true, the law still says they lose. Therefore, there is no point in having a jury trial. Just dismiss the case now. It's like a judge calling off the tennis match before the first serve because one player mathematically cannot win.

SPEAKER_02 40:31

That is a perfect explanation. The employer files a motion for summary judgment to kill the case early. And it was during this exact phase that Crisp's team just dropped the hostile work environment claim.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

Wow. Why would a lawyer willingly drop their strongest claim right when the employer is trying to get the case thrown out?

SPEAKER_02 40:49

We can only speculate from reading the decision. Perhaps they realized they had severe statute of limitations issues, since the worst behavior happened years prior in 2012 and 2018, and they hadn't filed EEOC charges in time. Right, the clock had run out. Or perhaps they felt they lacked sufficient corroborating witness evidence to survive the summary judgment standard. But the mechanical result of dropping it meant the court couldn't rule on the underlying toxicity of the workplace or punish the employer

Retaliation Law And The Court’s Rule

SPEAKER_02 41:18

for keeping gullet.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

The court's hands were tied.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

Exactly. The court was legally forced to focus only on the retaliatory firing claim.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

So they threw away the context. And what was the second massive legal misstep?

SPEAKER_01 41:31

She failed to bring a disparate treatment claim.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

Okay, let me unpack disparate treatment because this is one of my favorite legal concepts.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

That's a good one.

SPEAKER_00 41:38

Disparate treatment is basically the hypocrisy defense. It's when you argued to the court, okay, maybe I broke a rule by doing X, but my coworker Bob did the exact same thing last week and you didn't fire him. Therefore, you aren't actually firing me for breaking the rule. You are using the rule as an excuse to discriminate against me.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

Exactly. It's proving that the employer enforces the rules unequally. If Crisp could have proven disparate treatment, she might have saved her case.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

So how would that have worked for her here?

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Crisp needed to prove, or at least allege, that other EMTs at Seyota were allowed to share pornographic images or explicit material at work without getting fired. Ah if she could have shown that sharing news was a normal, accepted, unpunished part of the EMS culture at that specific station, she might have had a valid argument that firing her for it was discriminatory retaliation.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

You let the guys share porn, but when I share it to expose a predator, I get fired.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

Right. But she couldn't, or at least didn't, provide any evidence of that.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

So her argument just fell flat.

SPEAKER_02 42:41

Without evidence of disparate treatment, her firing looks entirely justified under the company's baseline exemplary behavior policy. The court looks at it and says, She broke a major rule, no one else is allowed to break that rule, so the firing is legal.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

So after years of harassment, trauma, and a lengthy federal lawsuit, she is left with absolutely nothing. Nothing. The harasser, Joshua Gullett, faced no legal consequences from this suit and presumably remained employed. And Gertrude Crisp is out of a job, lost her lawsuit, and has a federal court decision confirming she was legally fired for distributing pornography.

SPEAKER_02 43:18

It is a devastating outcome for her.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Which brings us all the way back to Mark Carey's central warning for you today. Because this isn't just an isolated, crazy story about one dysfunctional ambulance company in Ohio.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

No, it's not.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

The reason this case is so important is because this specific behavior is exploding everywhere. Employees in corporate offices, retail stores, and remote Slack channels are actively hunting down the OnlyFans, the FETLife, the private digital accounts of their coworkers.

SPEAKER_02 43:45

They're becoming internet sleuths.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

They are doing exactly what Crisp did, trying to use this digital footprint as leverage or as a weapon to expose people, shame them, and get them fired.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

And the Crisp decision sets a massive binding precedent for how courts will view this trend. It's the new rule book. It cements the absolute rule that bringing sexually provocative images into the workplace is illegal, period. It doesn't matter if you found them on a public website. It doesn't matter if you despise the person in the photos. It doesn't matter if you think you are performing a public service by exposing them.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

None of it matters.

SPEAKER_02 44:24

If you bring those explicit images into the office, or if you share them on the company Slack or team's channel, you become the problem. You are the one creating the hostile work environment in the eyes of the law, and your employer has every right to fire you immediately.

SPEAKER_00 44:38

Don't get fired for being stupid. It really is that simple.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

It is a harsh reality, especially when you consider it from the perspective of someone who endured what Crisp alleged she endured.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Yeah, you have to feel for her on some level.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

But the mechanics of the law require us to seek justice through the proper formal channels, timely HR reports, EEOC charges, and lawsuits not through vigilante exposure and the weaponization of digital footprints.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

So let's summarize this incredible, frustrating journey. We started with a horrifyingly toxic workplace environment, an insane asylum, as the plaintiff accurately called it. An environment where a woman was verbally degraded for years, physically assaulted, and fundamentally failed by an HR department that thought a schedule change was a cure for violence. A total failure. But because she chose to hold on to that trauma in silence, allowed the legal clock to run out on her actual claims, let the resentment build to a boiling point, and ultimately chose to weaponize internet pornography instead of utilizing proper legal channels. She, the victim, was the one who legally, irrevocably lost her job.

SPEAKER_02 45:41

It is a profound tragedy of errors, both institutional failures by the employer and strategic personal failures by the employee.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

It really is. And for you listening, whether you are an employee or a manager, it's a stark reminder of the rules of engagement in the modern era.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Very true.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Curiosity about our coworkers is a fundamental human treat. We all wonder what the person in the cubicle next to us or the person on the other end of the Zoom call is really like when they log off. Of course we do. But bringing that digital baggage, no matter what it is, into the physical workplace or even the remote

The Digital Footprint Liability Takeaway

SPEAKER_00 46:14

workplace on company servers crosses a hard, unforgiving legal line that will cost you your livelihood?

SPEAKER_02 46:21

Which leaves us with a provocative question to consider as we close out our analysis today.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Let's hear it.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

In an era where the boundary between our professional lives and our digital private lives is virtually nonexistent, and where everything is just a Google search away, how much of your own digital footprint or your idle curiosity about a coworker's secret life is a massive liability, just waiting to be weaponized by a well meaning but misguided colleague?

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Wow, it's enough to make you want to go clear your search history right now. Thank you for joining the conversation today. We'll catch you next time.