Lawsuit: KY lawyer groped, harassed two female employees with ‘beyond obscene’ videos
A Southern Kentucky lawyer groped two female employees, sent them videos of himself masturbating, exposed himself to them in the office and pressured the two to perform oral sex on him, according to a lawsuit filed this week.
Both women began drinking alcohol to deal with the graphic, continuous harassment by Shane Romines, the complaint said.
“For each Plaintiff, he would casually walk up behind her, reach down her blouse and fondle or squeeze one or both of her breasts, or, if standing, grab and squeeze her buttocks,” the sexual harassment lawsuit charged.
As for the videos, they were “perverse and beyond obscene,” the lawsuit said.
When one of the women asked if Romines meant to send her a video, he replied, “Yes, and I was thinking of you the entire time,” the complaint said.
Both women left the job in May because of the harassment, and Romines has since disparaged them, spreading rumors about them, the lawsuit said.
Romines has not yet responded to the allegations in court because the lawsuit was only filed two days ago.
Romines’ office referred questions to his attorney Thursday morning. His attorney was not immediately available.
The Herald-Leader is not identifying the two women because of the allegations they were victims of sexual abuse.
Romines grew up in Corbin and attended the University of Kentucky for undergraduate and law-school degrees, according to his website.
He has a law firm in Corbin and handles personal-injury and criminal-defense cases.
He has raised his profile in the area with billboards proclaiming “In Pain? Call Shane,” and showing him with a championship-boxing style belt draped over his shoulder.
The News-Journal, a weekly newspaper in Corbin and Whitley County, reported in April that Romines had established tabs at local restaurants for employees of the Baptist Health Corbin hospital to thank them for their work during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“Feel free to use the Champ’s tab,” he said in that story.
One of the women suing Romines worked as a legal assistant and the other as a receptionist, according to their complaint.
According to the lawsuit, Romines told one woman she needed to be friendly to him. She ultimately came to realize that included allowing him to send her obscene photos over SnapChat, making sexual comments to her, allowing him to touch her and facing questions about her sex life.
Romines allegedly increased his harassing behavior over time. For instance, after the woman accepted receiving pornographic pictures and being touched, Romines began exposing himself to her, repeatedly “flopping” his genitals out at her desk, between the stapler and pen holder, the lawsuit alleged.
When the woman faced a difficult time in 2018 because her husband had left, Romines allegedly stepped up the harassment further, beginning to demand that the woman give him oral sex in the office.
“He’d text, ‘I can be ready in five,’ “ the lawsuit said.
The woman declined Romines’ requests, but when the demands escalated later that year, she started drinking to get through the workday, the lawsuit said.
When Romines went through a divorce in 2019, he started demanding that the woman come to his house on the weekends for sex. She refused, but he warned her job was at risk for not being friendly enough, the lawsuit alleged.
In March 2020, when Romines once again exposed himself to her at her desk and asked for “just a little touch,” the woman, shaken, sick and “at the end of her rope,” picked up her letter opener and responded that she could “cut it right off” like Lorena Bobbitt.
Romines asked what was wrong with her and backed away. He stopped giving the woman work and then hired someone to replace her, according to the lawsuit.
She took sick leave in May and didn’t go back.
He demanded that the other woman send him explicit photos and be his “sexual slave,” letting her use her lunch hour to get drunk each time before calling her to his office to perform sexual acts, the lawsuit said.
The consideration she received for the “monstrous and inhuman” treatment was letting her keep her $22,000-a-year job, the lawsuit said.
When the coronavirus pandemic mushroomed in March and restaurants closed to in-person seating, Romines got irritable because no one left the law office during that day and he couldn’t abuse the woman the way he wanted to, the lawsuit said.
That gave the woman the gumption to begin resisting his sexual harassment, and Romines responded by yelling at her and bullying her, the lawsuit said.
She took sick leave in May and didn’t return.
The lawsuit argues Romines sexually harassed the women, intentionally inflicted emotional damage on them, retaliated against them and effectively fired them.
It seeks an unspecified amount of money to compensate them and punish Romines.
This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 2:07 PM.
