Louisiana Voice

In a day and age when there is heightened sensitivity to racial discrimination, age discrimination and sexual harassment, it’s difficult to fathom blatant violations of federal laws enacted to protect individuals from such behavior.

But then, we have the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and yes, Donald Trump, each of whom have been accused of such sexual harassment so egregious that it cost all but one of them their careers – and the jury, literally, is still out on the other one.

And now we have a lawsuit filed in Louisiana’s Western District federal court that contains charges of sexual harassment, falsification and destruction of records, and payroll fraud against an Alexandria restaurant franchisee and its human resources director that, if true, would repulse the most inured among us.

If the claims are founded, there will not only likely be a substantial monetary judgment and possible criminal charges against the defendants but in all likelihood, their franchises for Huddle House restaurants would likely be revoked by Huddle House’s parent corporation in Atlanta.

Huddle House restaurants, while constructed and operated in strikingly similar manner, are in no way related to Waffle House restaurants.

William Most, the New Orleans attorney who is representing a former employee in her fight, said the litigation was not filed against Huddle House Corp., but against its franchisee, D’Argent Companies, D’Argent Construction and D’Argent Franchising of Alexandria, and its human resources director Justin Giallonardo, son of D’Argent founder Thomas Giallonardo.

The lawsuit says that Justin Giallonardo attempted on several occasions to get plaintiff Samantha Williams, who was an employee of one of the Huddle House restaurants where she was in the company’s management-trainee programs, to have sex with him.

When all his efforts proved unsuccessful, he told her manager, Wes Pigoff, that if he couldn’t have sex with her, he was going to fire her. Pigoff said in a sworn affidavit that accompanied the lawsuit that he told the younger Giallonardo the he was Williams’s boss and could not be trying to date her or have sex with her, to which Giallonardo replied, “I can do whatever I want to.”

Williams quit before she could be fired and Pigoff completed forms for the Louisiana Workforce Commission which confirmed that she resigned but, he said in his affidavit, Giallonardo ordered him to re-do the form to indicate she was fired and to back-date the revised form.

Pigoff also said that he was instructed to alter timesheets for employees to remove all overtime worked so as to keep costs down and when he refused one month to do so, Giallonardo deducted $8,000 from Pigoff’s pay “which was the amount of the overtime that I did not delete over a period of time,” he said. “I estimate that over the course of her work at Huddle House, I deleted in excess of $10,000 of overtime for Samantha Williams along,” he said.

Pigoff also accused the Giallonardos of assigning the social security numbers of deceased persons to undocumented persons in order to employ them. “I heard Justin explain how ‘dead people are still working,’” he said. “Based on context and other things I had heard, I understood that to mean that D’Argent was using he social security numbers of dead people to knowingly allow undocumented persons to work.”

The Giallonardos also own D’Argent Construction, LLC.

The lawsuit includes copies of text messages between Justin Giallonardo and Williams as well as the original form indicating Williams had resigned and the one Justin ordered showing that she was fired.

Attached below are copies of Pigott’s affidavit and the lawsuit. Warning: the language and descriptions of events are of such a graphic nature that discretion should be used.