The state paid $395,000 to settle a lawsuit on behalf of a corrections officer who said she endured a hostile work environment because of her gender and sexual orientation while working at the Maine State Prison and Bolduc Correctional Facility.
Autumn Dinsmore, who filed the lawsuit in July 2021 in federal court in Bangor, resigned as a corrections officer on June 3 as part of the settlement.
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“This refusal of her male co-workers and supervisors to accept (the woman’s) sexual orientation is consistent with the workplace culture of treating women COs as sexual objects, and the traditional ideology that true lesbians are unlikely to exist because women cannot resist sexual attraction to men,” the lawsuit said.
The state will pay Dinsmore $235,000, while $160,000 will go to Johnson & Webbert LLP of Augusta, the law firm that represented her.
Read the full Portland Press Herald article here.