Tesla hit with lawsuit alleging disturbing sexual harassment at its Fremont factory

The car of the future may be born of a retrograde past.

An employee at Tesla's Fremont factory is suing the company, alleging ongoing sexual harassment from a manager that went unchecked for months — even after she reported it. The details in the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in California's Alameda County Superior Court and reported by Business Insider, are pretty screwed up and paint an awful picture of working conditions at the plant.

Specifically, Erica Cloud, an assembly line worker, claims that her manager would repeatedly propose marriage, "hug and massage" her, tell her about his supposedly large penis, and call her "'blackenese." According to the suit, Tesla's HR department took months to do anything about her complaints, and when it did finally respond, it did so in all the wrong ways.

That's right, Cloud says that HR essentially took it out on her — by sending her home randomly, and causing her to lose wages.

We reached out to Tesla for comment on the lawsuit and Cloud's claims, but received no immediate response. Tesla disbanded its press team in 2020.

This, notably, is not the first sexual harassment lawsuit against Tesla. In 2017, Tesla made waves when it fired an engineer who alleged sexual harassment and pay discrimination.

"It is impossible to trust anyone after they have behaved in such a manner and therefore continued employment is also impossible," a Tesla spokesperson said of the engineer, AJ Vandermeyden, at the time.

More recently, in Nov. 2021, Tesla's Fremont factory was the subject of yet another lawsuit.

"Tesla's factory floor more resembles a crude, archaic construction site or frat house than a cutting-edge company in the heart of the progressive San Francisco Bay Area," reads the lawsuit, reported by Business Insider.

And, of course, there's Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself. As recently as October, Musk made a series of sexist statements to his approximately 66 million Twitter followers (he has since deleted some of the offending tweets).

It seems, if the lawsuits are to be believed, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.