Wells Fargo let boss grope and harass exec, and fired her for complaining: lawsuit

A Wells Fargo boss started by mocking a female executive’s fiancé, moved on to inappropriately touching and groping her, then threatened to take sales opportunities from her if she didn’t date him, according to a new lawsuit against the San Francisco-headquartered bank and the alleged harasser.

Wells Fargo management responded to complaints by the former VP and senior portfolio manager, who filed suit anonymously as Jane Doe, by forcing her to continue working with the man, attempting to block her from receiving a hefty referral fee and commission, and finally firing her, the lawsuit claimed.

Wells Fargo spokeswoman Laurie Kight said Wednesday the bank was reviewing the lawsuit. “We take all allegations of misconduct very seriously,” Kight said.

Doe started in an executive position at Wells Fargo in 2000, in a Los Angeles unit devoted to serving high-wealth clients, and was promoted to a senior VP position five years later, according to her lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Starting in 2016 and continuing into 2020, she was subjected to sexual harassment by a superior, Carl Nelson, a VP and senior private banker, her lawsuit claimed.

Nelson has since resigned from Wells Fargo, according to Doe’s lawyer Ronald Zambrano. Nelson did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages from this news organization at his new workplace in a different bank.

The alleged harassment started after Doe brought her fiancé to the office for lunch, and Nelson began referring to the man as her “boy toy” and asked her to have dinner and wine with him instead, the lawsuit claimed.

Nelson would enter Doe’s office, immediately shut the door, then massage her shoulders and neck while saying she “looked tense,” the lawsuit alleged. Although Doe told Nelson she did not want to be touched, he continued the behavior, the lawsuit claimed. On one occasion, he told her he liked the way her jacket looked on her, then “proceeded to feel the portion of (Doe’s) jacket that was on (her) arm and chest,” the lawsuit alleged.

Two colleagues who allegedly saw Nelson behaving inappropriately would go into her office whenever they saw Nelson enter, “in an attempt to block Nelson’s touching,” the lawsuit claimed.

Doe complained in vain multiple times about Nelson to her manager and the bank’s human resources department, the lawsuit alleged.

“For years, Wells Fargo did close to nothing to investigate (Doe’s) complaints of sexual harassment,” the lawsuit claimed. “Thus, Nelson’s inappropriate behavior continued.”

From 2018 to 2020, Nelson “used his authority and status” to threaten Doe in order to compel her to see him outside of work, the lawsuit alleged. “Nelson would tell (Doe) that he would not give her any sales opportunities unless (she) went out with him,” the lawsuit claimed.

Doe continued to complain to her manager and HR about Nelson’s alleged threats, and invitations for her to come to his house to “exercise and shower with him,” but HR did nothing and her manager suggested she tell Nelson she “only works during business hours,” the lawsuit claimed. Her manager denied her request to remove her from business accounts associated with Nelson, so she was forced to continue working with her harasser, the lawsuit alleged.

In 2019, Doe was to receive a mandatory $10,000 fee for referring someone for a Wells Fargo position, but her manager and another manager refused to pay her, the lawsuit claimed. She only received the money after she complained to HR, the lawsuit alleged. The next year, she was supposed to receive a commission for securing a deal that “brought the bank a large amount of money,” but her manager and an investment manager denied her the commission, and she only received it after talking with a new office manager, the lawsuit claimed.

A week after she received the money, her manager fired her “under the pretext that ‘Wells Fargo was laying people off because of COVID-19,’” the lawsuit alleged.

Doe’s lawsuit alleges sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination, and retaliation. She is seeking unspecified damages.

The legal action follows another lawsuit against Wells Fargo filed in February by a different “Jane Doe,” a senior VP who worked in another office of the bank’s same Southern California unit serving rich customers. She claimed her superior, a managing director, made sexually explicit comments to her and touched her inappropriately throughout the three years she worked for Wells Fargo, and raped her while she was intoxicated on a work trip.

After she reported the alleged attack to her manager and via Wells Fargo’s “ethics hotline,” and filed a police complaint about it, her clients were reassigned to another employee and she was excluded from important client communications, her lawsuit claimed. “For several months Wells Fargo did close to nothing to actually investigate (her) report of being raped and harassed … such as asking for witnesses or getting (her) statement,” the lawsuit alleged.

Zambrano claimed Wells Fargo’s HR department addresses workplace complaints through an opaque process in which “they put in this front work to make it seem like they’re doing something, but they’re really not doing anything.”