Brooklyn Bakery Owner Groped Underpaid Female Worker: Suit

CARROLL GARDENS, BROOKLYN — A Brooklyn bakery worker who finally found a new job after years of sexual harassment and 60-hour work weeks says her former employers tried to get her fired from the new gig, a lawsuit claims.

The worker, named in court records but not in this article to protect her privacy, is suing the owners of Union Street's Mazzola Bakery, who she says made her work 50 to 60 hours a week with out legally-required overtime pay, according to the lawsuit.

And, to make matters worse, one of the owners regularly slapped the woman on the butt or followed her into the bathroom for three years, the lawsuit claimed.

But when she left the job last year and brought a lawyer to try and complain about the missing wages, the owners instead called up her new job and tried to get her fired, the lawsuit claims.

"Defendant Frank Caravello called [her] current employer...and, in an effort to blackball her, told [her] supervisor that [she] was a bad person and that she should be fired," the lawsuit writes.

Frank Caravello is one of three owners named in the suit, along with his sister Josephine Messina and his father Francesco Caravello. None of the owners responded to a request for comment.

The woman started working at the bakery as a cashier in 2005, according to the lawsuit, and first started having problems with her paycheck in 2013.

The owners would have her work either six or seven days every week, without giving her breaks during her seven, or as long as nine hour, shifts. The woman made $10 an hour in 2013 and had her pay increase about a dollar each year until she was making $15 an hour in 2018, according to the suit.

But the bakery owners didn't pay the woman the legally-required time and a half — or 1.5 times her usual rate — for the hours she worked more than 40 hours a week, the lawsuit claims.

"Defendants Mazzola Bakery and Frank Caravello acted in this manner to maximize their profits and minimize their labor costs and overhead," the lawsuit says.

Francesco Caravello then started sexually harassing the woman in 2016. Caravello would brush his hand against her butt, slap her as she reached down to help a customer and follow her up to the second story bathroom so he could slap her on the butt when she walked out, the lawsuit claims.

Caravello would sometimes even grab her chin and look at her with "menacing eyes," the lawsuit said, which made the woman fear for her safety.

The woman complained to the other two owners multiple times about their father's harassment, but they ignored her, the lawsuit claims.

"As a direct and proximate result...[she] has suffered, and continues to suffer, severe mental anguish and emotional distress, including but not limited to, depression, humiliation, embarrassment, stress and anxiety, loss of self-esteem and self-confidence, and emotional pain and suffering," the lawsuit writes.

The lawsuit lays out eight specific claims against the owners and demands that they pay damages to the woman, though an exact amount is not specified.

An attorney for the woman did not immediately respond to questions about the case.