Leticia Zuniga was working on the cleaning staff of the upscale shopping mall Ridgedale Center, in Minnetonka, Minnesota. She worked for the subcontractor Service Management Systems, which is a Tennessee based-company with employees who clean malls throughout the country. Her boss was Marco Gonzalez. Zuniga alleges that during the time she worked for SMS, Gonzalez raped her repeatedly. Zuniga was an undocumented worker and Gonzalez knew that and took advantage of her vulnerable position, knowing that she would not report him for fear of being deported. But she did!
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Zuniga did not pursue legal action right away because she was afraid for herself and her family. Gonzalez knew this. He knew her husband, he knew she had two children that would be left with out a mother if she were deported, he knew the documents she had presented to get the job were fakes. She remembers him saying, 'If you ever tell anyone, I'll report you to immigration." So she didn't tell anyone, not at first.
Her children and husband noticed changes in her. One day, she just couldn't take it anymore and she told her husband, Abraham Quevedo, what had been happening to her.
Zuniga found herself looking for a new job and while at an employment fair, she met an advocate and shared her story. The advocate called Ridgedale Center to report Zuniga story. The mall contacted SMS and they did a deplorable job of so-called investigating, with the investigation being led by the alleged rapist, Marco Gonzalez. Gee, I wonder whose interests he's going to have in mind?
Zuniga decided to pursue legal action even though doing so would put her at risk of deportaion. Her lawyers helped her attain a U visa, which is only available for victims of crimes and by no means guaranteed.
Rape cases are very difficult to prosecute, especially if they are not reported within the first 24 hours. Most of the time there are no witnesses and evidence is harder to find the more time elapses. Zuniga had for understandable reasons waited so long to report the rapes, that on a criminal front there didn't seem to be much hope, but she didn't give up.
Instead, she filed a lawsuit against both Gonzalez and SMS. The case was settled out of court. What Zuniga did is remarkable. "To our knowledge, this had never been done," says Stratton, one of Zuniga's lawyers. "No one has gone to trial admitting that they're an undocumented worker, and were abused in this way."
In a truly just world the despicable actions of Mike Gonzalez and SMS failure to properly protect their employees from sexual harassment would be punished, but we don't live in that world. In the world we live in, it takes the courage of survivors to stand up and call attention to the harm that has been perpetrated against them. It takes someone like Leticia Zuniga to stand up and tell her story.
In June, Zuniga will receive the "Courageous Plaintiff" award from the National Employment Lawyers Association for for showing "that it is possible for an undocumented worker to win a lawsuit against a big corporation."
