Mad Mex worker's record payout after sexual harassment case
Biplavi Magar is due to receive $305,000 after the court heard her former manager Sher 'Sonny' Khan harassed her while she worked at the Norwest — in Sydney's Hills district — franchise in early 2023.
In one January 2023 incident, the court was told Mr Khan asked Ms Magar to accompany him to his car. When she got inside, he showed her pornography on his iPad.
On January 12, 2023, the court heard Mr Khan asked Ms Magar 'sexualised and demeaning questions' about how she got a bruise on her neck and whether she got 'banged'.
Mr Khan's alleged conduct also included asking Ms Magar if she would 'f***' her co-workers – but not himself – some of whom she told the court were 'like 13/14' years old.
'They were my brothers and sisters, like, kind of felt like that because they were younger than me,' she said. 'And, yes, I did tell him that.'
The court was told Mr Khan showed Ms Magar a Coles bag with sex toys, including dildos and vibrators and touched her inner thigh with a sex toy.
'I just wanted to vomit,' she told the court.
'And then he told me, like, 'This is not the usual one that I use on my skank or, like, my whores, but, like, these are the new ones, so you can touch it if you want to'.'
When she raised the issue with Mad Mex head office, the court heard, Mr Khan's lawyers sent Ms Magar a concerns notice requesting monetary compensation and an apology.
In court he denied ever owning an iPad or sex toys or that such items were ever in his car.
He also denied touching Ms Magar with any sex toys or asking her any questions related to sex toys.
Justice Robert Bromwich on Friday awarded Ms Magar $160,000 in damages, eclipsing the previous record of $140,000 for a sexual harassment case.
He also awarded aggravated damages for the legal conduct of Mr Khan and $130,000 for past and future lost earnings.
'I find that she was sexually harassed by Mr Khan and victimised for complaining about his unlawful conduct,' Justice Bromwich said.
'I am also satisfied that his conduct caused her to suffer loss and damage.'
Justice Bromwich noted that Mr Khan was in his early 60s and 'several aspects' of his longstanding health conditions had 'rendered him impotent'.
'This was advanced in an endeavour to support his denial of comments attributed to him by Ms Magar,' he said.
'Although not explicitly put, it was suggested that he could not have been physically aroused, making it improbable that he would have made the comments as alleged.'
The judge, however, found that a physical inability to carry out certain sexual acts did not 'provide any compelling basis for concluding that he did not talk about them as though they had really occurred'.
His lawyers argued that his various medical conditions rendered it 'unlikely, and even to a degree impossible', for him to have engaged in the alleged conduct.
'This conclusion is further strengthened if Ms Magar's evidence in that respect is otherwise accepted,' he said.
'The reason is that boasting or bravado about fictional sexual exploits is notoriously an aspect of sexual harassment.
'The conduct alleged was mostly verbal, and to the extent it was said to have been physical in nature, it was neither protracted nor strenuous.
The judge found Ms Magar presented as a mostly calm and forthright young woman.
'She came across as somewhat naive and unworldly, giving her a real sense of vulnerability,' he wrote in his judgment.
'With the exception of giving evidence concerning her assertions of conduct which, if accepted, clearly amounted to sexual harassment, she was calm and clear.'
Ms Magar was represented by Redfern Legal Centre, and its senior solicitor Seri Feldman-Gubbay.
Ms Feldman-Gubbay said the 'landmark decision should act as a warning to employers: if you tolerate sexist workplace cultures, target vulnerable workers for sexual harassment, or threaten defamation proceedings against employees who speak up about sexual harassment, you will face the most serious consequences'.
'Our client, an international student with no income, would have had no viable path to justice without the support of a community legal centre and pro bono counsel,' she said.
'Despite legal intimidation at every step of this proceeding, our client persisted.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
3 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Famous jail escapee John Killick sets record straight
John Killick, the man who orchestrated Australia's most daring prison escape when his girlfriend hijacked a helicopter to fly him out of Silverwater Gaol, wants to set the record straight. Yes he spent his adult life storming into banks, threatening terrified bank tellers and escaping with loads of cash — giving little thought to the havoc he caused. And yes he encouraged his then Russian-Australian lover Lucy Dudko to hijack the chopper on March 25, 1999, hold a gun to the head of pilot Tim Joyce and brazenly land in the jail yard to pick him up. But he never shot and wounded a cop during the Bowral bank robbery two months earlier — despite the claim being passed on through generations in media reports that 'repeat the falsity until it becomes fact'. 'An off-duty cop chased me and threw rocks just missing my head,' Mr Killick said during an interview with at his home in north Sydney. 'I fired two shots well over his head and one into the ground during the chase to scare him off. I was later arrested by other police.' To Mr Killick, it is important for the public to know the truth: that he never shot anyone. While he concedes two out of 12 people involved in a bank robbery suffer long-lasting emotional trauma — something a psychologist explained to him and he now understands and accepts — he never physically injured anyone. And while we are on setting the record straight, he was convicted of a robbery in South Australia that he did not commit, something the courts have since confirmed. At 83 years of age, Mr Killick concedes with a wry grin that he's had nine lives. He was shot at nine times and not once has he been hit. He wants people to know the truth before he dies. He revealed the pair had a machine gun that didn't work, and he advised Mr Joyce that he could make a lot of money on 60 Minutes if he didn't get in the way of the Hollywood style escape. But after seven weeks on the run the publicity was too much and the law caught up with the Bonny and Clyde-style couple. In the 11 years since his release, he has done everything he can to make amends. 'I've got to the stage where it really bores me to talk about the helicopter escape,' Mr Killick said. 'Unless you are in your late 30s you wouldn't even know about it unless someone tells you about it but I understand the interest in it,' he said. 'What I do want to do though is correct the part that is not fact but keeps getting copied from newspaper to book. Once I'm gone the reports are all there is and they will become the truth,' he said. 'I never shot at anyone. The trouble is that when something like this happens and everyone is rushing to get the story, somebody hears something about ne and they repeat it … somebody writes something, and I don't know who started it, but next thing everyone copies it. It goes everywhere, so it's really hard to change it.' Mr Killick, who has written numerous books — including his most successful one about the jail break called The Last Escape — doesn't want sympathy. He's at peace with the choices he made, some that landed him in the highest security prisons in the country, and saw him rubbing shoulders with the likes of serial killer Ivan Milat. 'I almost believed he didn't do it,' Mr Killick reveals of the time the couple spent walking together in their half hour of sunlight while housed in the high-risk section of Goulburn jail before there was such a thing as Supermax. 'It was after I got arrested for the helicopter, they classed me as very high, extremely high risk and they put me in the same wing as him, pretty close to him,' Mr Killick recalled. 'I used to hear him sing out to everybody at night that he was innocent. He had half the wing convinced. 'Anyway it was isolation, and then they came to me and said 'John do you want to have an hour a day, three days a week to walk in the yard with someone and it was Milat. 'I said 'okay' and as soon as we got out into the yard I confronted him. 'I said to him 'Listen, I hear every night you saying you're innocent. You've been convicted of something that's evil. He told me he knew it was evil and he didn't do it. 'For months while I was walking up and down with him he was trying to convince me that he's innocent. What people don't realise is he was charismatic, he was smart, and he had the gift of the gab and he nearly swayed me and I'm pretty hard to sway. But also I knew how the police can operate.' Milat provided Mr Killick with the contradictions in evidence about his four-wheel drive —enough to make Mr Killick seek out the court papers of Milat's trial once he got out of jail. 'What he had never mentioned to me was that every time one of these kids went missing he had a day off from work. What are the odds of that? 'So I wrote to him and said 'listen, you're as guilty as hell' and told him 'don't write to me or Lucy or anyone because you are guilty as hell'. 'He never wrote back, well at least I didn't get the letters if he did.' Mr Killick resents being lumped in with violent, evil criminals like Milat and is still bitter that a newspaper article featuring him and two other killers thwarted one of his parole bids, despite his history of being a model prisoner and studying and working to better himself. But nothing compares to the unfounded accusation of him shooting at the officer and being jailed for the bank robbery he didn't commit. 'I got set up for that one in South Australia by (corrupt Sydney cop) Roger Rogerson. I was planning on doing it but I pulled out when I realised they were junkies, so the bloke got his wife to do it instead. But I copped it,' he said. 'What I do accept now though, and it took a lot of counselling and hard work to get here, is that I hurt a lot of people doing the crimes I did,' he said. 'My mum killed herself when I was 17. The banks foreclosed on our house when I was a kid, I thought it contributed to mum killing herself so my attitude was stuff the banks. 'But as I say now, you know, that's all abstract stuff. It's not you against the banks. It's you against the people in the banks. But now I realise there might have been 12 people at a bank I robbed and two of them probably can't recover. 'Now I can visualise Gloria, my wife, in a bank and someone running with guns, wearing a balaclava and she would have a heart attack. So I accept that I hurt a lot of people.' Mr Killick thinks his 28 year sentence was harsh and that Lucy, who has since found God and living happily in Sydney, was 'punished and put through hell' for her role in the escape. 'She lost a lot and I think 10 years for her was too harsh,' he said, believing the couple were punished for embarrassing the commissioner. Mr Killick writes books and gives talks on his wild days on the wrong side of the law but these days he's trying to make up for the wrongs by giving back. He wants his son to be proud. Most of the profits from his books - thousands and thousands of dollars - he has given to children in other countries. 'Well the reason I wanted to do an interview is because I am 83 and I've been shot at nine times but I have never been shot so I am more likely to die of old age and when I do I want people to know that I have spent the last 11 years since I have been out of jail trying to do good,' he said. 'I have sold a lot of books and most of it has gone to kids in the Philippines, Krygisztanan and Africa,' he said, producing pages and pages of receipts to prove the donations. 'To me, it's a lot of money I've sent and still do. I used to say most of my life was spent committing crimes but I think I have gone a long way to balance up the good outweighing the bad. 'That's something I want people to know and want my son to see, so he has something to remember me for, other than being a bank robber.' Mr Killick now does lectures to law students at University of NSW, does a regular podcasts with Macca's Old School Podcast on You Tube, does talks at Geelong Gaol Museum and has done more than a dozen tours and walks at Pentridge where he spent four years in the notorious H Division, thanks to a group called Pentridge Voices. Mr Killick was in H Division when Ron Ryan was hanged on February 3, 1967 - making hin the last Australian man to be hanged. Mr Killick and others in the jail believed Ryan was innocent.
News.com.au
26 minutes ago
- News.com.au
‘No-one could locate him': Grisly story about man accused of double murder in Melbourne
A year before the chilling alleged double murder in Melbourne, signs went up around a local park about the accused killer and his dogs. Ross Judd, 34, has been accused of the gruesome murders of Athena Georgopoulos and her partner Andrew Gunn at a block of units in Mount Waverley, 16km southeast of the Melbourne CBD. The pair were found late on Monday night in the second-from-last townhouse on Adrienne Crescent. Mr Gunn, 50, had been decapitated and his head was reportedly mounted on a spike. Ms Georgopoulos, 39, was five months pregnant with her first child. Mr Judd, a homeless man who was well known in the Mount Waverley area, allegedly walked two kilometres from the crime scene to McDonald's after the killings and ordered food. Employees say he was covered in blood and accompanied by two German Shepherds — dogs that reportedly never left his side. He was arrested, barefoot and bloodied, at a nearby train station and charged with two counts of murder. Locals who spoke to say they are shocked by what happened in their sleepy suburb. But one said Mr Judd was well known and had been linked to a separate incident a year earlier. 'No one could locate him' was told that a year before the alleged double murder, Mr Judd's two dogs were involved in an incident that led locals to erect signs around a popular walking track. 'The homeless guy who is said to have killed those two people is well known in the area, especially around the Fairway Reserve walking track,' the local said. 'His two off-lead German Shepherds killed a Maltese dog last year. No one could locate him for a while and there were signs all along the path to tell people to be wary of two off-leash German Shepherds.' Fairway Reserve, which borders the popular Scotchman's Creek, is a 23-minute walk to Adrienne Crescent where the couple were found late on Monday night. The two dogs have formed part of the investigation into what led to the alleged murder. It was reported earlier this week that neighbours of Mr Gunn noted what they thought were tensions over Mr Gunn's beloved dogs. Police have been told that Mr Judd was seen around the area earlier on the evening that Mr Gunn and Ms Georgopoulos were killed with his two canines in tow. According to the Herald Sun, Mr Gunn and Mr Judd may have been involved in an argument about the sale and ownership of other dogs. Mr Gunn and his pet dog, a German shepherd called Dragon, were inseparable. Friends of Mr Gunn said: 'That's what spun me out when I heard about (the deaths), because he and his dog went everywhere together and Dragon wouldn't let anyone near him.' Dogs waited outside for Mr Judd 'soaked in blood' It comes as chilling footage appears to show Mr Judd in the hours before and after the couple's deaths. The Australian reports that Mr Judd was seen by locals at a bottle shop about 9.48pm on Monday. He purchased a number of items while his two dogs waited outside. Staff could reportedly be heard in CCTV footage saying he was 'soaked in blood'. Mr Judd fronted Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Wednesday for a brief administrative hearing, charged with two counts of murder. Flanked by two guards, he stumbled as he entered the court. 'I beg your pardon, yeah I'm all good,' he said. Mr Judd was wearing a dark-coloured T-shirt and sported a short beard and hair spiked up in a faux-hawk. At one point, he smiled and winked at members of the media. The court was told police were seeking an extra 10 weeks to prepare a brief of evidence in the case. Police allege the accused was known to the couple, and that one of the victims lived in the unit. Friend did not know she was victims' neighbour Dimmi, a woman who lived less than 100m from where the killings occurred, told this week that she was awake until midnight on Monday and did not hear a thing. She found out about the alleged murders the following day and the realisation hit her that she knew the victim. Dimmi said she was close friends with Ms Georgopoulos' mother and knew the victim as a young girl, but in a bizarre twist she was not aware that they had recently become neighbours. 'I didn't even know she lived there,' she said. 'I'm Greek too, so I was so close to her mother, but didn't see her for about 10 months. 'I've been here for 25 years, I walk along this street all the time but never saw her. 'I'm going to ring her mum, I'm in shock now. They used to come to my house all the time. 'She was a lovely girl. A very nice girl. I'm so, so sad.' Another neighbour, Mary, said she too had also never seen Ms Georgopoulos despite living several doors up the road. 'Everybody is shocked here. It's amazing that it's just happened so close. I've spoken to others in the street and they said they didn't hear anything,' she said. The alleged motive remains unclear. Detectives said they are not seeking anyone else in relation to the killings and confirmed a weapon, although not a firearm, was used in the alleged murder. Graffiti was visible on the couple's home the day after the killings, with one message reading 'Karma is not a menu'. Other phrases were also visible including 'betrayal, unpredictable, inevitable'. 'Police are aware of graffiti on the property in Mount Waverley where the bodies of two people were located last night,' a police spokesperson said. 'Homicide Squad detectives will work to determine if the graffiti is relevant to the murder investigation.'
ABC News
33 minutes ago
- ABC News
Clashes with police in Melbourne's CBD as Women Will Speak rally held at state parliament
There have been scuffles and angry confrontations between police and protesters who converged on Melbourne's CBD to counter a women's rights rally. Vision shows a group of people dressed in black with their faces covered clashing with officers on Russell Street on Saturday morning. It is believed the group was connected to a counter-protest against a Women Will Speak rally being held on the steps of state parliament on nearby Spring Street. The rally was organised by Women's Voices Australia and attended by dozens of people. Women's Voices Australia's social media accounts described the group as working to maintain and strengthen women's and girls' sex-based rights, freedom of speech and eliminate all forms of silencing through legislation. A social media call-out by Trans Queer Solidarity urged counter-protesters to come wearing masks and to cover identifiable features. "Be ungovernable," a post said. "Don't let fascists speak. "The terf networks are mobile again." TERF is a term used to describe 'trans-exclusionary radical feminists'. Police set up barricades on Spring Street to keep the two groups apart. A small group of counter protesters banged drums, clapped hands and blew whistles while waving transgender flags. Most members of the group did not directly confront officers on Spring Street or the rally attendees, but there was a report of a small scuffle with a member of the media. On Friday, Victoria Police alerted the media to online posts encouraging some of the protesters to interfere with journalists covering the event, including damaging cameras. News outlets were encouraged to consider their security arrangements. Melbourne's CBD was declared a designated area for Saturday, allowing police to randomly search people and ask them to remove headwear, scarves and outer clothing. Police were yet to confirm how many arrests were made.
