The lead attorney for SkyWest Airlines attempted Wednesday to discredit the testimony of a former employee who testified that the airline did nothing when she complained of rampant sexual harassment in the company’s maintenance and parts facility at DFW International Airport.
During more than three hours of cross-examination, the former employee, Sarah Budd, acknowledged that she provided few details when she complained to her supervisor in 2019 about what she now calls pervasive crude and demeaning conduct by the overwhelmingly male force of airline mechanics she worked with.
When, in December of that year, she detailed in an email to her supervisor a litany of offensive comments she claimed she’d heard — most of them too graphic to be published here — Budd did not identify which SkyWest mechanics she alleged had made the comments.
Her testimony came in the jury trial of a lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against SkyWest, a Utah-based regional carrier. The trial before Senior U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater in Dallas is expected to conclude next week.
Liz Drumm of Fisher Phillips in Dallas, lead attorney for SkyWest in the case, noted in her cross-examination of Budd that the former parts clerk’s supervisor gave a dramatically different account than Budd of a meeting the two had on Sept. 4, 2019, less than a month after Budd went to work at the DFW facility.
Budd testified on direct examination Tuesday that when she complained to the supervisor, Dustin Widmer, about what she said was a toxic workplace environment, he told her that if he took any action it would only make matters worse for her because there would be “a target on my back. … He didn’t do anything.”
In excerpts read on the stand Wednesday from Widmer’s deposition in the suit, he said it was Budd — not he — who suggested letting the matter lie because Budd feared that a formal complaint would result in retaliation against her.
Widmer said in the deposition that he didn’t press Budd for details about the comments that had distressed her because it was clear to him that she was reluctant to discuss them and he “wanted to respect her privacy.”
Widmer is listed in court documents as a witness for the EEOC in the suit and a possible witness for SkyWest.
In addition to Drumm, SkyWest is represented by Chad A. Shultz of Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani in Atlanta.
The EEOC is represented by, among others, Alexa Rae Lang of the agency’s Dallas office. Budd, as an intervenor plaintiff, is represented by Edith Thomas of Zipin, Amster, & Greenberg of Silver Spring, Maryland.
After receiving a complaint from Budd, the EEOC sued SkyWest in August 2022. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory and exemplary damages.
Budd took an unpaid medical leave of absence from SkyWest in October 2019 and resigned in May 2020, according to court documents. She testified that going to work each day at the DFW facility “was like a form of torture” and that the onslaught of crude and demeaning sexual comments by her co-workers made her physically and psychologically ill, to the point where, at one time, she contemplated suicide.