Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Cases: Verdicts, Settlements, and EEOC Decrees

Sexual harassment lawsuit cases have produced outcomes across an enormous range, from EEOC consent decrees in the mid-six figures to a $900 million California jury verdict in 2024. Where a case lands depends on the forum, the employer, and whether retaliation is part of the claim. This is what recent verdicts and settlements actually look like, and what shapes them.

Recent Major Jury Verdicts

Jury awards in sexual harassment cases can dwarf what the EEOC recovers through settlements, especially in state courts that impose no cap on damages.

$900 Million Against Alkiviades David (2024)

In June 2024, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded $900 million to a plaintiff identified as Jane Doe who alleged a pattern of workplace harassment that culminated in rape by billionaire Alkiviades David. The award included $100 million in compensatory damages and $800 million in punitive damages, with the incidents alleged to have occurred between 2016 and 2019 at companies David controlled.¹ Previous juries had already awarded over $80 million against him in separate lawsuits. A judge later ruled the original award “shocked the conscience” and ordered a new damages trial unless the plaintiff accepted a reduced total of $90 million, split between $10 million compensatory and $80 million punitive.²

$464.5 Million Against Southern California Edison (2022)

In June 2022, a Los Angeles County jury awarded $464.5 million to two former Southern California Edison employees who alleged they had been subjected to sexually and racially abusive behavior and then retaliated against for reporting it. One plaintiff was fired two months after filing an internal complaint, ending a 16-year career. The five-year litigation and two-month trial produced what has been called the largest jury verdict in an employment case in U.S. history, with $440 million of the total consisting of punitive damages.³

$5.5 Million Against C&M Defense Group (2026)

In early 2026, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia awarded $5,540,452 to Makita Bryant, a former security guard who alleged that the company’s vice president of operations subjected her to sexual harassment, assault, and threats. The defendants stipulated to liability before trial, leaving the jury to decide damages only. The award included roughly $1.58 million in compensatory damages and $3.96 million in punitive damages. The EEOC had previously issued a Letter of Determination finding reasonable cause that the company subjected Bryant to a hostile work environment and retaliated against her for reporting. The court also instructed the jury that the company had failed to preserve text messages between its executives and that the jury should assume the missing evidence was unfavorable to the company.⁴

SkyWest Airlines (2024)

A Northern District of Texas jury returned a verdict of over $2 million after finding a sexually hostile work environment in SkyWest Airlines’ maintenance division. Damages were reduced to $300,000 under Title VII’s federal cap, but the court also ordered injunctive relief including mandatory training.⁵

Large Settlements and Class Actions

Some of the most consequential sexual harassment cases are class actions or multi-plaintiff lawsuits, often against institutional defendants.

USC and Dr. George Tyndall

A class action on behalf of approximately 17,000 to 18,000 former patients of USC gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall produced a $215 million settlement fund. A separate action by more than 700 women resulted in an additional $852 million settlement, bringing the total above $1 billion.⁶

Alphabet (Google)

Shareholder derivative lawsuits against Alphabet, consolidated in Santa Clara County Superior Court, alleged a pattern of concealing executive sexual misconduct. A $310 million settlement in 2020 established a diversity and inclusion fund and mandated governance reforms, including the elimination of mandatory arbitration and nondisclosure agreements for harassment claims.⁶

McDonald’s

In April 2020, a class action was filed on behalf of female employees at over 100 corporate-owned McDonald’s restaurants in Florida, alleging sexual harassment and physical assault and seeking $500 million in compensatory damages plus punitive damages. As of 2026, the case remains active, with McDonald’s contesting class-action certification.⁷

Apple

In June 2024, a putative class action was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of more than 12,000 current and former female Apple employees in California, alleging the company systematically paid women less than men in its engineering, marketing, and AppleCare divisions. In January 2025, a judge denied Apple’s motion to dismiss and its motion to strike the class allegations, allowing the litigation to proceed.⁸ The case is ongoing with no settlement reached.⁹

Consolidated Edison

In March 2025, Con Edison reached a $750,000 settlement with the New York Attorney General over allegations of a pervasive pattern of workplace harassment and discrimination. Settlement terms included independent monitoring, expanded training, and redesigned reporting mechanisms.¹⁰

Typical EEOC Consent Decrees

Cases the EEOC files or resolves tend to settle at amounts well below headline jury verdicts, but they still produce meaningful recoveries and injunctive terms. Between fiscal years 2018 and 2021, the EEOC received 27,291 sexual harassment charges. Women filed 78.2% of them. The agency recovered nearly $300 million during that period for 8,147 individuals.¹¹ In fiscal year 2024, the agency filed 111 new merits lawsuits across all discrimination categories, resolved 132, and reported a 97% success rate in merits lawsuit resolutions.¹² The fiscal year 2025 annual report identified 29 lawsuits specifically involving harassment and sexual harassment.⁵

Recent examples give a sense of the typical range:

Justin Vineyards and The Wonderful Company agreed in 2026 to pay $1.49 million to resolve an EEOC sexual harassment suit.¹³
Bigfoot Energy Services and Iron Mountain Energy entered a three-year consent decree worth $697,500 for claims of sexual harassment, race discrimination, and retaliation (E.D. La., 2025).⁵
Wal-Mart Stores East paid $415,112 under a consent decree after the EEOC alleged a store manager subjected female employees to unwelcome sexual touching and solicitations. The settlement prohibited the former manager from being rehired (S.D. W.Va., 2025).⁵
HHS Environmental Services paid $400,000 under a consent decree after the EEOC alleged a male employee sexually harassed female housekeepers and the company retaliated against those who complained (D. Utah, 2025).⁵

Why State Court Often Means Bigger Awards

The gap between a $300,000 reduced federal verdict against SkyWest and a $900 million California jury award is not an accident of the facts. Federal law caps compensatory and punitive damages at a combined $300,000, depending on employer size. Several states impose no caps at all, which is one reason the largest jury verdicts come from state courts, particularly California.¹⁴

State law also reaches further in other ways. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act covers employers with as few as five employees for discrimination claims and all employers regardless of size for harassment claims. California allows a three-year statute of limitations for filing discrimination complaints, compared to the 180- or 300-day federal window.¹⁵ New York’s Human Rights Law applies to employers of any size, and harassment can be actionable even if it is not frequent or extreme enough to be obvious to everyone. New York employees can file lawsuits directly in court without first going through an administrative agency.¹⁰ Both California and New York extend harassment protections to independent contractors, who are excluded from Title VII.¹⁴

What the Law Requires to Bring a Case

Federal law does not use the phrase “sexual harassment.” Courts have interpreted Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination to cover two forms of harassment: quid pro quo, where a supervisor conditions a job benefit on sexual favors, and hostile work environment, where unwelcome conduct is severe or pervasive enough to alter the conditions of employment. Harassment becomes unlawful when enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or when the conduct is severe or pervasive enough that a reasonable person would consider the work environment intimidating, hostile, or abusive.¹⁶ Isolated incidents, simple teasing, and offhand comments generally do not meet this threshold unless they are extremely serious.¹⁷ The victim and harasser can be of any gender, the harasser can be a supervisor, co-worker, or a non-employee like a client, and the victim does not have to be the direct target.

Employer Liability

If a supervisor’s harassment leads to a tangible employment action like firing, demotion, or an undesirable reassignment, the employer is automatically liable. If no such action is taken, the employer can raise the Faragher-Ellerth affirmative defense: it must prove that it exercised reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct harassing behavior, and that the employee unreasonably failed to use the preventive or corrective opportunities the employer provided.¹⁸¹⁹ When the harasser is a co-worker or non-employee, the employer is liable only if it knew or should have known about the conduct and failed to take prompt corrective action.¹⁶

Filing Deadlines

Before filing a federal lawsuit, an employee must first file a formal charge of discrimination with the EEOC.²⁰ The deadline is 180 calendar days from the alleged harassment, extended to 300 days if a state or local agency enforces a similar anti-discrimination law. After investigating, the EEOC issues a Notice of Right to Sue, which gives the employee 90 days to file in court.²¹ Title VII applies to employers with 15 or more employees.¹⁷

Retaliation Shows Up in Nearly Half of Cases

Nearly half of all sexual harassment charges filed with the EEOC between 2018 and 2021 included a retaliation claim.¹¹ The pattern drives case outcomes: the Southern California Edison verdict was built on retaliation after an internal complaint, the SkyWest and HHS Environmental Services cases involved retaliation findings, and the C&M Defense Group jury heard retaliation evidence alongside the underlying harassment.

To prove retaliation, an employee must show they engaged in a protected activity (filing a formal charge or opposing conduct they reasonably believed was discriminatory), that the employer took a materially adverse action, and that there is a causal connection between the two.²² The employee does not have to prove the conduct opposed was actually illegal. A good-faith belief that a hostile work environment was developing is enough.

Forced Arbitration No Longer Blocks the Courthouse

On March 3, 2022, President Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. The law voids predispute arbitration agreements and class-action waivers in cases involving sexual assault or harassment allegations, giving employees the choice to bring their claims in court rather than behind closed doors.²³ It applies to claims arising on or after the effective date.²⁴

Courts have since worked out the Act’s scope. In Johnson v. Everyrealm, a federal court in the Southern District of New York held that if a case contains a sexual harassment claim, the entire case goes to court, including unrelated claims like race discrimination or wage disputes. In Monteiro v. RAC Acceptance East (D. Mass., 2025), a court ruled that hostile work environment claims fall under the Act if at least one act of harassment occurred after the March 2022 effective date, even if the harassment pattern began years earlier.²⁵ Not every court has read the Act as broadly. In Mera v. SA Hospitality Group (S.D.N.Y., 2023), wage and hour claims brought as a collective action were found not to “relate to” the plaintiff’s sexual harassment dispute and could still be sent to arbitration.²⁶

Where EEOC Guidance Stands Now

On April 29, 2024, the EEOC published new Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace, its first comprehensive update since 1999. The guidance addressed harassment in virtual work environments and on social media and introduced terms like “intersectional harassment” for conduct targeting a combination of protected characteristics.²⁷ Eighteen states challenged the guidance’s gender-identity provisions, and in May 2025 a Texas federal court vacated those portions nationwide.²⁸ On January 22, 2026, the EEOC Commission voted 2-1 to rescind the guidance entirely. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas emphasized that the rescission “does not give employers license to engage in unlawful harassment” and that existing federal law and Supreme Court precedent remain in effect.²⁹ The underlying statutory framework, filing procedures, employer liability rules, and the forced arbitration law all continue to govern how sexual harassment lawsuits are brought and resolved.

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