A 31-year-old woman training to be a cross-country cargo trucker claims her supervisor held her hostage in the cab of the truck, sexually harassed her and molested her for nearly a month, with the most egregious allegations occurring in Oregon in November 2018.

She filed a civil rights lawsuit Monday against the trucking company, New Prime Inc., and the driver, seeking more than $11 million in economic, compensatory and punitive damages.

“She was trapped in a truck cab for weeks with this guy and terrorized,” said Ryan M. Kroll, her lawyer. He filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Portland.

The suit alleges that the Missouri-based trucking company had an obligation to keep the driving trainee safe but failed to do so and has a history of similar problems involving its truck drivers. A separate federal suit is pending against the company in Missouri, alleging similar behavior by another male driver against another woman in training.

“Traveling at highway speeds, forced to live, work, eat, and sleep in the same cramped, boxy cab as her harasser, and far from home and without friends or support, (the plaintiff) was repeatedly molested, groped, propositioned, tormented, demeaned, and harassed by the man assigned by New Prime as her trainer and supervisor,” the suit says. “This was not an isolated incident -- New Prime was on notice that male drivers had, on several previous occasions, similarly harassed and assaulted female drivers.”

Steven Crawford, general counsel of the trucking company, declined to comment about the Oregon lawsuit or if the driver named is still employed.

The trainee started with the company in 2018 and was placed with a male driver that October even though she requested a woman trainer, according to her lawyer. The two set out from Pennsylvania on Oct. 28, 2018, making deliveries across the country.

The driver molested her and repeatedly propositioned her to engage in sex while disregarding her “vehement rejections of his advances,” Kroll wrote in the suit.

The trainee was scared to report the abuse because the driver was her supervisor and she was told if the arrangement didn’t work out, she’d lose her job, according to the suit.

The suit alleges that sometime in Oregon between Nov. 19 and Nov. 21, 2018, the driver forced her to shine a light from her cellphone on him while he masturbated and made her watch. She ended up recording that incident. In another encounter, he sucked on her toes and masturbated while he trapped her in her bunk in the truck, the suit alleges.

It also alleges he put his hand between her legs while she drove, knowing she couldn’t fight back while driving.

The company removed the woman from the truck on Nov. 24 last year and she left the company that month after traveling around 2,000 miles, about 1,000 short of what she needed to become a full-time driver herself, according to the lawsuit.

She reported the alleged sexual battery in December 2018, first to a law enforcement agency out of state and then to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, her lawyer said. By then, the supervisor was out of Oregon and no criminal charges were pursued against him, according to the woman’s lawyer.

The woman is suing the company under Oregon, California and federal law.

In June 2018, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a separate federal lawsuit against New Prime Inc. in Missouri, alleging the trucking company failed to take adequate steps to prevent the sexual harassment of another female truck driver.

In that case, New Prime Inc., which does business as Prime Inc., denied the allegations and its lawyer said the company has “consistently maintained an Equal Employment Opportunity Policy, that it has consistently provided sexual harassment training, that it provides information to its employees and contractors regarding the prohibition against discrimination and harassment, and … when allegations are made, responds promptly, conscientiously, effectively, and appropriately.”

In 2016, a federal judge in Missouri ruled that the trucking company had violated federal law by discriminating against female truck driver applicants when it required that they be trained only by female trainers and ordered it to pay more than $3.1 million in lost wages and damages to more than 60 women.

New Prime Inc., described as one of the nation’s largest refrigerated, flatbed and tanker carriers, had adopted a same-sex trainer policy in 2004 after a male driver was found to have sexually harassed one of its female driver trainees, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet the policy led to a discrimination charge by a female applicant, who alleged that it forced women to wait extended periods for training and be denied employment because of the few women trainers available. The company discontinued the same-sex trainer policy in 2013 as a result of the discrimination allegation.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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