An employment tribunal case where the claimant mistook “xx” in an email as kisses has failed after the judge ruled it was a genuine request for information and did not constitute conduct of a sexual nature.
Ms Gasparovav worked for essDOCS, a company specialising in digital trade management solutions, from 2019 until her resignation in July 2021. She told the central London employment tribunal that an email she received using “xx”, “yy” and “????” constituted a sexual advance.
The basis for this was that the “xx” referred to kisses, “yy” denoted sexual contact of some nature, and the “????” was a coded way of her boss Mr Goulandris asking her when she would be ready to engage in sexual acts with him.
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The email followed a number of alleged touching incidents that the tribunal deemed accidental, innocuous, and not of a sexual nature.
The email read: “Can you please complete the following: The solution us [sic] currently used by xx Agris companies and yy Barge lines in corn cargoes in south-north flows in the ???? waterways.
“Also, can you remind me of what the balance of the rollout will be and the approx timing? Thanks”
The claimant told the tribunal that Goulandris already knew the information he was asking for in the email which was the main reason why she interpreted it in the way she did.
She also told of an occasion where, after she sent a presentation to her boss for review, he had returned it with “(ajg)” appended to the filename. She told the tribunal that she interpreted “ajg” as being an abbreviation for “a jumbo genital”.
In her evidence to the tribunal, she admitted that she did not know this possible meaning of the initials until she searched for it on the internet.
The claimant’s rationale for refusing to accept that the use of “ajg” in the file name was Goulandris’s initials was because he had used lowercase letters. She said that a man as “rich and powerful” as him would never put his initials in lowercase but would always use capitals.
Employment Judge Burns said: “We found this extraordinary. We find that the ‘ajg’ was simply a reference to the initials of Mr Goulandris.”
The judgment said that the claimant’s case “rested on interpreting seemingly innocent interactions between her and Mr Goulandris and finding a sinister motive in them. In our judgment, this led her to take a skewed perception of such interactions”.
Other than Gasparovav’s claim of direct sex discrimination relating to how her grievance appeal was handled by an outsourced HR consultant, and a claim of breach of contract arising from non-payment of bonus, all of the other claims – which included sexual harassment, wrongful dismissal and other claims of direct sex discrimination – failed and were dismissed.
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The claimant was ordered to pay the respondent’s costs in the sum of £5,000.
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