Texas strip club dismisses pregnant bartender who didn’t fit ‘fantasy,’ lawsuit says
A Texas woman is suing her former employer after she says the strip club stopped scheduling her when she was pregnant in 2019.
Bexar County resident Sara Soto says San Antonio Men’s Club violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex and pregnancy discrimination. The lawsuit was filed Nov. 11 in the U.S. District Court of Western Texas in San Antonio.
35 Bar & Grill, LLC, which does business as San Antonio Men’s Club, could not be reached by McClatchy News. A call to the strip club went unanswered.
The lawsuit says Soto was hired by the business in November 2017 as a server before she was promoted to bartender in 2018. She typically worked five shifts a week and would sometimes be called in for extra shifts on her days off.
In January 2019, she told her general manager that she was pregnant. Two months later, in March, Soto was being scheduled for fewer shifts, according to the lawsuit. First, she would be scheduled for three shifts a week, and then that dropped down to two per week.
On April 2, 2019, Soto texted her scheduling manager about her reduced schedule.
“She told him in her text messages ‘I can’t pay my bills on 2 days a week,’” the lawsuit says. “He responded: ‘I am suppose to let u go till ur done with the pregnancy but was tryn to give u some shifts.’”
The general manager also told Soto that she didn’t fit into their “fantasy” and people don’t want to see someone pregnant while at the strip club, according to the lawsuit.
“Sometimes it’s not about right and wrong — it’s about business and it’s not personal,” he said, according to the lawsuit.
Fellow employees of Soto planned a baby shower at work for her, the lawsuit says. But as she attended the event, she saw she was no longer on the schedule for future shifts.
She was never scheduled for work again, according to the lawsuit.
Soto filed a Charge of Discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in July 2019 on the grounds of discrimination due to pregnancy. In June 2020, the EEOC issued a determination saying “the evidence obtained during the investigation indicates that after Charging Party (Ms. Soto) notified her employer of her pregnancy, her work schedule was severely reduced until she was entirely removed from the schedule,” according to the lawsuit.
The document also says her pregnancy was the “motivating reason for the adverse actions taken against her.”
Soto is suing for compensatory damages, including lost income and benefits, and for emotional pain and inconvenience.
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 3:27 PM with the headline "Texas strip club dismisses pregnant bartender who didn’t fit ‘fantasy,’ lawsuit says."