An actress is suing the owner of The Preserve in Richmond. Here's the latest.
PROVIDENCE - An actress who alleges she was sexually harassed by the owner of the luxury Richmond shooting club The Preserve Sporting Club and Residences has won permission to include an allegation of retaliation in her federal lawsuit.
In the latest back and forth of claims and counter claims involving Alison McDaniel and The Preserve’s owner, Paul Mihailides, U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith this week permitted McDaniel to amend her lawsuit to include a specific allegation of retaliation.
That incident involved the named defendants in the case – Mihailides, The Preserve and its management company – filing a police incident report in Dallas, Texas, where McDaniel now lives.
Accusations of laptop theft triggered retaliation claim
The incident report stated that McDaniel, who worked as a contracted spokeswoman for The Preserve doing promotional work, had been “terminated” in late 2021 and alleged to have committed computer theft and other crimes against The Preserve, Smith explained in his ruling.
The lodging of the incident report was enough for a Dallas detective to contact McDaniel about the theft allegations – which were never filed with any Rhode Island police department, said McDaniel’s lawyer Mark Gagliardi.
Said Smith in his ruling: "It is important to note that defendants’ filing is not a petty slight or a minor annoyance that falls outside of the protection of anti-discrimination laws." The defendants "invoked the power of a local criminal justice system, several months after the alleged volatile conduct took place, to allegedly harass her for engaging in protected conduct [filing her complaint]. That is not something to shake off.”
The latest back-and-forth between McDaniel and Mihailides
McDaniel and Mihailides have been trading public allegations against each other since at least last summer.
In July 2023 McDaniel, who runs her own promotions agency, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Mihailides and The Preserve claiming that from the time she was hired in December 2019 until she left in February 2022, she was repeatedly subjected to unwanted sexual comments and advances by Mihailides.
Mihailides, her lawsuit contends, “subjected her to repeated sexual advances including attempts to kiss her on the mouth, requests for sexual favors, inappropriate touching, ogling with suggestive overtones, and verbal and physical harassment of a sexual nature, which were unwelcome and offensive to McDaniel."
As one example, McDaniel alleges in her suit that on Oct. 11, 2021, she met with Mihailides “in yet another attempt to get an overdue paycheck. During this meeting, Mihailides told McDaniel that he was a ‘good lover’ and that if she ‘wasn’t such a prude, [her] life could get a lot better,' or words to that effect, telling her again, 'You give a little, you get a lot.’"
Within two weeks of McDaniel filing her lawsuit, Mihailides countersued.
He denied all the allegations and characterized McDaniel as a disgruntled former contractor who attempted to extort $50,000 from The Preserve after he demanded she return a laptop, hard drive and other Preserve property.
“After the Preserve at Boulder Hills rebuffed McDaniel’s extortive demand for $50,000 for return of its hard drive and after McDaniel had tried to sabotage the Preserve’s social media sites and successfully thwarted that effort, McDaniel then embarked on a public campaign to harass, embarrass, threaten, intimate, defame and slander Mihailides," the suit reads.
Mihailides said this wasn’t the first time McDaniel had sued an employer for sexual harassment.
In 2009, while working as the general manager of a restaurant owned in part by entertainer Justin Timberlake, McDaniel claimed in a lawsuit that she had become “the subject of vile and discriminatory conduct, and of a hostile working environment, because of her gender.”
According to Mihailides' lawsuit, McDaniel alleged that restaurant workers “engaged in and allowed others to engage in the viewing of internet pornography on the restaurant’s premises, in [her] presence and to her extreme emotional distress and humiliation.” The case was settled.
McDaniel, who appeared in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” and on the television soap the “Guiding Light,” is suing Mihailides and The Preserve for $3.1 million in damages and lost income.
Mihailides’ counterclaims include unspecified damages for "conversion, extortion, wire fraud, computer crimes, alteration of a check, online impersonation, cyber stalking and cyber harassment, libel, and various privacy claims.”
McDaniel has asked for a jury trial.
Contact Tom Mooney at: tmooney@providencejournal.com
Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that McDaniel's suit against her former workplace did not allege that Justin Timberlake engage in watching internet pornography on the restaurant's premise. That allegation is included only in Mihailides' lawsuit.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Actress Alison McDaniel's suit against The Preserve moves forward - what to know
