Slander By Employer

[Foma]

my boss has been sharing my personal and confidential info with patrons in the bar she owns.ive been dealing with depression due to the death of my husband, and its gotten worse since she began her attack on me. She is telling people im committing myself to a psych unit because i have mental issues when in fact its depression and im not going to a hosp. she has been making false statements to them accusing me from being a bad employee, a bad parent, and using drugs in her bar. all of which are untrue. she also has said she is doing this to make me quit because she does'nt want to fire me and have to pay unemployment benefits. what are my rights?

[Fausto]

Hi Sharon.

Truthfully, your questions are best answered by an employment law attorney. If you don't know of an attorney, there are sites like allexperts.com that offer legal advice.

What I can tell you is that you need to do the following in the meantime:

1. Directly tell your boss to stop sharing any personal and / or confidential information about you immediately. 2. You will need proof, or at the very least, documentation, of what comments were made and when. Hopefully you've written these down. If not, can you recall and write down what you can remember.

3. Are there any witnesses who heard any of these comments? If so, would they be willing to come forward with that information if needed? 4. Are you the only employee being talked about or are there others that your boss is inappropriately gossiping about? Are you the only female working at the bar...in other words, are you being picked on because you are a woman or possibly because you are in another protected class? Sharon, while you look into your options further, be sure to be professional at work and don't give your boss or anyone else any reason to point out that you are part of the problem. In other words, don't give them anything that they can use against you, should this come to some kind of legal hearing.

It is unfortunate that your boss is demonstrating these kind of behaviors. Is your boss the owner of the bar? If not, you can also request a meeting with the owner and share your concerns and possible actions you may take? Why not, what do you have to lose? Also, any attorney will want to know if you took all the possible actions you could to stop this behavior. In other words, was the inappropriate behavior addressed with your boss, either by you or the owner? Either way, let me know what you end up doing. I wish I could have helped more but legal questions are best answered by legal experts.

-Dr. Mac