Federal Judge Dismisses Municipal Credit Union Sexual Harassment Case
Former senior executive who filed the lawsuit and MCU agree to a confidential settlement.
A federal judge approved the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a former senior executive Anie Akpe-Lewis who claimed her supervisors at the $4.2 billion Municipal Credit Union ignored and retaliated against her over complaints of sexual harassment by Kam Wong, the former president/CEO of the New York financial cooperative.
Lawyers for Akpe-Lewis, Wong, MCU, and others said in a letter that both sides reached a confidential settlement. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge William F. Kuntz’s for the Eastern District in Brooklyn ordered the case be dismissed with prejudice, meaning Akpe-Lewis can never refile the same case before the court.
Akpe-Lewis, MCU’s former vice president of mortgage operations, filed the lawsuit in June 2020, claiming that rather than investigating and remediating the alleged sexual harassment by Wong, the credit union and some of her supervisors allegedly subjected her to reduced bonuses, denied her regular evaluations, excluded her from monthly meetings with her colleagues and ridiculed her for her afro hairstyle.
She also claimed that from October 2007 to December 2017, she was “repeatedly a target of a continuous, unwanted and hostile illegal pattern of quid pro quo sexual harassment by Wong, and that she was constantly being propositioned by him to have an intimate and illicit sexual relationship.”
MCU, former senior executives and HR consultants named as defendants in the lawsuit have denied her claims.
Lawyers representing the credit union and the defendants argued Akpe-Lewis’ lawsuit should be dismissed because her sexual harassment and retaliation claims were mere assertions not backed up by specific facts. MCU’s lawyers also contended that Akpe-Lewis’ retaliation claims should be thrown out, because she alleged to have rejected Wong’s advances as early as October 2007, but she wasn’t terminated from her job until June 2019 and suffered no alleged adverse actions until at least eight years later in 2015 when she began complaining about her bonus reductions.
In addition to Wong, who was sentenced in 2019 to five and a half years in federal prison for embezzling nearly $10 million from New York City’s oldest credit union, the lawsuit named four other senior executives, P. Kay Woods and Mark Ricca, who both served as MCU’s CEO at different times when the credit union was conserved in 2019 after a widespread fraud and corruption scandal was exposed. Also named as defendants in the lawsuit were former MCU Chief Credit Officer and interim CEO Norman Kohn; Sonita DiFranco, former director of real estate lending; and HR Consultants Shannon Mashburn and Stella Jiang. All of these people were Akpe-Lewis’ supervisors.
Judge Kuntz dismissed Akpe-Lewis’ allegations against DiFranco, Jiang, Woods and Ricca, ruling that the claims made against them were insufficient to establish individual liability.
However, Akpe-Lewis’ allegations against Wong, Kohn, Mashburn and MCU were not dismissed.
Although Judge Kuntz also dismissed Akpe-Lewis allegations of wage and breach of contract claims against MCU, he did not dismiss her sexual harassment allegations and, in November 2022, he referred the case to a mediator to negotiate the settlement.