Friendly Ford co-owner ordered to pay $65K

Friendly Ford auto dealership co-owner Jay Wise was found liable for assault and battery against Ames during Ames’ employment with the company. Ames’ suit alleges that he and several co-workers were subjected to physical abuse at the hands of Wise.

According to Greene County Circuit Court documents, the charges allege that Wise repeatedly struck Ames and other male employees in the ear with a comb, dubbed “Mr. Snappy,” as a form of reprimand.

Additionally, Wise allegedly struck employees in the genitals in what Wise referred to as “horseplay,” according to the court deposition Ames’ attorney, Mark Bodine, sent to Springfield Business Journal.

Bodine said Ames quit after Wise spit ice water down his back and made an inappropriate comment about what it might have felt like.

Ames is one of 10 plaintiffs in the case; each of the 10 originally filed eight claims. Only five claims still await trial; plaintiff Greg Hanson took one claim to trial last year and lost, and the rest were dismissed, according to Wise’s attorney, Kevin Case of Case & Roberts in Kansas City.

Bodine, of Bennett & Bodine in Shawnee, Kan., said he couldn’t remember a case where the details struck him as being this bizarre.

“I’ve never even heard of a case where you had the owner of a very large business being a perpetrator of this. It’s pretty outrageous behavior,” Bodine said.

The jury awarded Ames $65,000 in damages plus court costs, and all the damages were punitive, because Ames had no medical bills as a result of any of the incidents in question.

“We said (Wise) was like a playground bully,” Bodine added. “He’s trying not so much to hurt people as much as to embarrass them; he did this when other people were around to show the power he had. That was kind of the bully attitude I portrayed to the jury. He’s not trying to injure them – he’s trying to humiliate them.”

Case said the allegations are full of inaccurate portrayals of both his client and the work environment.

“What you must appreciate is that when Mr. Bodine first filed this lawsuit … he originally made 80 claims against our clients, and before the case went to trial, 73 were dismissed by Judge (Mark) Fitzsimmons,” Case said. “This is the first claim that went to trial, and we’ve not prevailed at the trial level. We think once the post-trial motions are filed, we feel confident that we’ll be granted at least a new trial.”

Case said there were a number of aspects of the case, including a history of illegal drug use by Ames, that were not properly represented in the trial, all of which will be made clear in the appeal of the verdict. Bodine noted that Wise’s attorney tried unsuccessfully to have the suit dropped because of Ames’ history.

“We will not in any way budge from our very strong position that these claims are not meritorious,” Case said. “We expect to prevail (in) the remaining five claims that will go (to trial).”

No court dates have been set for the remaining claims.

A case such as this one would not fall under the jurisdiction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which handles cases of harassment based on race, sex, national origin, religion, age or disability. But Sharron Blalock, district training manager for the EEOC’s St. Louis district, said there are ways for employers to prevent harassment in the workplace, regardless of type.

“What we try to encourage employers to do is to be proactive by having a good harassment policy in place,” she said. “They should make sure it’s communicated to the employees and then train the managers to know what their obligations are under the law in terms of preventing harassment in the workplace.”

Perhaps the group’s methods are working – national figures for the number of charges filed with the commission totaled 79,000 in fiscal year 2004, down 5.9 percent from 2002.

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